Today I would like to introduce our medical team. We get very often very sick children, who are in need of medical attention and extra care. I am not talking about a cold, some cough or malaria, but about seriously sick children, whose life is at risk.... That is why our medical team is very important. When a new child is taken into Amecet, the medical person on duty, will take the child to the doctor (next door). Tests will be done and treatment will be prescribed. The medical team works together to fulfil the prescription. It might be just oral medication, but very often it is IV medication. They will give the baby/child a cannula and the schedule for the times to give the medication, is made.  At the moment we have 3 people in our team (l to R) Sharon, Joanna and Immaculate. Immaculate lives in the Amecet compound, so she will give injections at night, if needed. She is also available to be called at night, if anything is needed. 

Meet our 3 Musketeers, our Social Workers. They are the back bone of our Home! We have 2 Social Workers, Pius and Simon) and 1 Counsellor (Andrew) On the picture they sit in the office (L. to R,) Andrew, Pius and Simon. They do a lot of work, often outside the home. When a child is abandoned somewhere, they go there and they talk with the people in the area, they hang up posters with the picture of the child and ask people who know the relatives to call us.

This is the present leadership of Amecet: (L to R)  Dominique, Andrew, Pius, Simon and Els.  We meet every Monday morning to discuss the present situation and to plan the week. Dominique is responsible for the daily activities in the house, she is like our home manager, Andrew is a Counsellor and he talks with people, the staff, but also people who come at our doorstep for help. He keeps an eye on the maintenance of the house and he goes also out to the villages with the social workers to visit the families. Pius and Simon are our Social Workers, They are going out to the villages a lot. And then me, I am a lot in the office, doing the administration, finances, the P.R.  organize the ALT meetings and the Staff meetings, keeping an eye on the medical team and in between........ cuddle baby's......

 For more than 22 years, the caretakers of Amecet cared for all the 1198 children, we had in Amecet. Of course the faces have changed, but the care is still the same!! Without these precious ladies, there would be no Amecet... They bath the children, feed the children, change the diapers, play with them, cuddle them, love them, sometimes do exercises with the children. 

In the last 3 blogs, I have shared how the Amecet Ministry started. Amecet helps children in the Teso region, in North-East Uganda. The Teso region contains 10 different districts and around 2,5 million people live here. The main source of income is agriculture, crops and cows.

2003 was a year full of importance events. In Uganda was Joseph Kony active. he had formed an army, which he called " the Lord's army" and his aim was to conquer the North of Uganda under his command. His army had a lot of kind soldiers, children he had kidnapped and changed into killer machines. Kony was dangerous and in 2003, he had come to the Teso region.  One evening I had talked our Amecet staff, and encouraged them to make a bag with important things and have that bag ready, in case that.... Together with Helen, I started that evening to pack important things for Amecet, the files off the children, medication, clothes, sheets etc. for " in case of that..." of course nothing would happen, but you never know... The days before, Simon and me visited several children deep in the village and every time we heard that the next day Kony had been there... It was scary. The people in the villages all gathered together in the centers of the villages, big camps were build and the local militia, the Arrow Boys, defended the camps. Sometimes people tried to sneak out to their gardens, to get some crops, they were killed by Kony's army, who even lived in the homes of the people. 

Amecet started really in my heart in 1999, when I met Sarah. Sarah was a very small, sick little girl, who lived in the village, where we came with the Mobile Clinic. I was working that time with FACE, a programme of Youth With A Mission Soroti, The programme was reaching out to the people living with HIV/AIDS in the villages. This was long before the ARV's were available. ARV's are medicines which slow down the growth of the HIV virus in the body. FACE had a Mobile clinic which could only help the people with the opportunistic infections they had, because of being HIV+.

Angella was brought to Amecet via a mission hospital in the village. Some weeks ago, they contacted us about this little girl, but she was so sick, that she first was admitted in the hospital for 2 weeks. She was still severe malnourished, her weight was 5.2 kg and she is 2,5 years old. Angella was brought by her mother and a nurse from that hospital. She was very weak, I saw directly that there was more going on than malnutrition only. I asked the mother some questions and then I heard that Angella didn't cry after she was born and that they had brought her to a bigger hospital after the birth, where she got oxygen... Angella had probably brain damage because of that.... She could hardly hold her head up and she couldn't speak. We took her to the clinic next to Amecet and the tests we did there, showed a very severe anaemia. Normal for her, the HB should be above 10, but Angella's HB was 1.2..... This is very, very low and she was given blood transfusion as soon as possible.  We were lucky that there was blood available in the clinic.. 

There are 2 months between those 2 pictures... and we can see a significance change in the two boys!! They were referred by the neonatal ward in Soroti Hospital. When they came to us their weight was 1 kg and 1.1 kg.  They were in our medical room for long, we fed them by NG tube for a while, because they were too weak to drink by themselves. They were sick a couple of times, inspite of our nets, they got malaria, but after treatment, they are fine again.

We hear a lot of sad stories, when they bring children to Amecet and we see a lot of suffering children. Aaron is around 3 years old, he was abused by relatives. There were old scars and new wounds... It looks like burn wounds and our hearts went towards this little boy. You could see the plea for help in his eyes... His hands were the worst, and we had to cover the wounds for the danger of infection. He enjoyed the care we gave, the food he was offered to eat and the hugs and love we gave him. Our social workers went to the village, to see the situation and the family will not place him back to the aunt and uncle he was with before. His mother loves him, but she can't look after him because of the stroke she has suffered from. Still we will try to place him back to his mother and other relatives. For now, he is still with us, he is doing well, playing with the other children, his wounds are healed, his weight id gaining and he laughs a lot!!!

One  month ago, we got very tiny, mini twin boys in Amecet, Abraham and Joseph, their weight was 1.160 kg and 1.050 kg. It is such a challenge to get those little ones.. They were one month old and of course premature born. They were together in our medical room and we feed them by NG tube, because they are too weak to drink themselves from the bottle. They are gaining, very slowly, but steady, Joseph, the smallest one  (on the picture) his weight is now 1.8 kg!!! His brother is almost 2 kg. but Joseph got malaria, and he was treated by IV medicines. It looked that it went well, on Saturday, we did a malaria test again and it showed no malaria parasites.... But he got some fever the night before and our nurse saw that the feet were white, quite suddenly, so we did a blood test again to see how his hemoglobin was, it was very low... The doctor told us that he needed blood transfusion.. And it was Saturday...  That means that it is even more difficult to get blood in the main hospital...  They called me (it was my free day and was planning to go with my daughters to a wedding). But I went to Amecet and got all the papers and went together with Simon to the hospital.. There was some blood in the blood bank, but not the right blood type. The man with the key to the new blood was coming.. I sat there, and I decided I would stay there until I got that blood, I would not go out of there without that saving 23 ml blood A+.... It took almost two hours, and knowing that this little baby was not doing well, made me nervous. We had taken his saturation before I left, it was also going lower. This blood was the only thing that could help him...