What Good care can do

On 16 Januari 2007 a little girl was brought to us. Being just 1 year old she only had a weight of less then 4 kilo's.
Dr. Bothas of the Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) clinic investigated her medical condition and came to the conclusion that she would have little chance to survive.
She had the most serious level of AIDS (level 4), had probably TB and was completely dried out.
Nevertheless he decided to get her on ART medication and we started taking care of the little girl.

A Dutch volunteer took her into her apartment and was taking care of her day and night. 

In the beginning it was quite hard to get the little girl to swallow her medication, because she wasn't used to any liquid food at all, and to be true: the medication doesn't taste very nice also!

But after a few weeks things she started to grow. She took several bottles of milk a day, a few weeks later more and more spoons of yogurt and eventually fast food.

As soon as she got better, we could see that, although she still looked like a little baby, she actually was already one year old!
She started to recognise people, discovered she could laugh and she grew more active every day.
In the end she could sit right up and was laughing the whole day.
Then she started to walk alongside tables and chairs.

Just to give you an impression of what only tree month of good care at the Holy Family Centre can do for children like this, we present a series of photo's, showing her development from January till the end of March 2007.
 The last three pictures show her at the age of  4, 5 and 6 years old.