OPERATION BLESS ING INTERNATIONAL

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A MIDNIGHT RIDE TO SAVE A LIFE

AUGUST 2016

Operation Blessing staff search desperately for a hospital to save a baby girl { PAGE 8 }

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Inside this issue Cover PAGE 8

A Midnight Ride to Save a Life Operation Blessing staff search desperately for a hospital to save a baby girl

4 Happenings Catch up with the goings on at

Operation Blessing!

6 Daring to Start Over Single mom of two determined to find

a fresh start in a new country

7 The Pitter-Patter of Little Feet Surgery corrects a toddler’s clubfoot

in Nicaragua

12 Loaves & Fishes Multiplying your donor dollar

by Bill Horan

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With the gift of a food cart, Marcela can now support her three children in Honduras.

Read more of her story at OB.ORG/MARCELA

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5ECUADOR: A little girl fills a pitcher with safe water from a tank built by Operation Blessing in the wake of the devastating earthquake in Ecuador.

4 KENYA: In Kenya, many women refuse to go to the hospital to give birth for fear that they will die from a caesarian section. Beatrice had a high-risk pregnancy and Operation Blessing-trained Community

Health Workers conducted home visits with her and advised her to go to the hospital. There she gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Felix.

6UNITED STATES: Volunteers work to clean up a water-damaged home in Rosenberg, Texas. Operation Blessing’s U.S. Disaster Relief team has deployed to the state three times so far in 2016.

1EL SALVADOR & HONDURAS: On a recent trip to Latin America, Operation Blessing president Bill Horan met with El Salvador’s Vice President, Óscar Ortiz, and the First Lady of Honduras, Ana García de

Hernández, to discuss ways to combat the Zika threat in their countries.

3HAITI: A child enjoys a meal at Operation Blessing’s Higher Ground school in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Here, children receive two nutritious meals a day to go with their education.

2 GREECE: Syrian refugees gather around food supplies they received from Operation Blessing shortly before their refugee camp on the Macedonian border was cleared by Greek authorities.

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OPERATION BLESSING

HAPPENINGS1

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ETHIOPIA

Two-year-old Feyeri had a grand entrance into this world: she was born on her mother’s immigration journey from their home country of

Eritrea to their ancestor’s home of Ethiopia. Freweini and her then-three-year-old daughter Mamuk were migrating to Ethiopia after the girls’ father abandoned them, leaving Freweini with no choice but to find a new home.

With a toddler and a days-old infant in tow, Freweini had nothing but the clothes on her back. They had little-to-no food or housing on their journey, and the three were living only on the charity of others. At the appeal of a local resident, Operation Blessing partner Embracing Hope Ethiopia intervened in their situation.

Shelter and food provisions were set up for Mamuk, Feyeri and Freweini until they were able to sustain themselves. In a short time, Freweini found work as a cook and cleaning woman, Mamuk was enrolled

in nursery school and Feyeri was set up at the local daycare center, where the entire family received food for their first month in Ethiopia. Clothing, furniture and bedding materials were also provided, as well as counseling to help Freweini adapt to life in a new country.

Freweini is forever grateful for the help from Operation Blessing and Embracing Hope Ethiopia. Without food, clothing and shelter, Freweini believes Feyeri would have died soon after she was born. The encouragement she received gave her the confidence to believe that instead of living a life of desperation, she and her daughters could have hope for the future. ◆

SINGLE MOM OF TWO DETERMINED TO FIND A FRESH START IN A NEW COUNTRY

DARING TO START OVER

Life-Changing Surgeries

Three-year-old Stephany was born with a clubfoot,

which meant learning to walk and run was almost impossible. Thankfully, though, treatment for her condition started before her first birthday, paving the way for the little girl to enjoy an active childhood.

Operation Blessing together with partner Miracle Feet has worked with Stephany for the last two years through twenty-four rounds of casting, two surgeries, and ten bracing adjustments.

Her resilience and her caretakers’ diligence in following up with doctors has given Stephany the chance to look forward to walking, running and playing outside with her friends. ◆

FREWEINI IS FOREVER GRATEFUL FOR THE HELP FROM OPERATION BLESSING AND EMBRACING HOPE ETHIOPIA

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NICARAGUA

THE PITTER-PATTER OF LITTLE FEET

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HAITI

•At least 1 in 10 babies is born preterm — that’s around 15 million babies a year!

•In some countries, up to 18% of babies are born preterm. *

DID YOU KNOW?

Few passersby would have suspected that the motorcycle speeding through Port-au-Prince in the dead of the night did

so on a mission of life or death. The motorbike’s precious cargo was baby Mickaela, born just hours earlier, whose life now hung in the balance.

The destination for the frantic midnight ride was a hospital, any hospital, that was equipped with an incubator.

Earlier that evening, Mickaela’s mother, Vilicia, was introduced to the local Operation Blessing team while they were visiting an OBI supported school. Vilicia was six-months pregnant and in severe pain. She was also bleeding, making the gravity of the situation abundantly clear. The nearest hospital was over an hour away and Vilicia didn’t have a vehicle. The OB Haiti team rushed Vilicia to a maternity hospital where doctors concluded that the baby had to come out as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have room to perform the surgery there, so Vilicia was rushed to the General State Hospital by ambulance. Robenson Petit-Homme, OB Haiti’s health program coordinator, met Vilicia at the hospital and paid for the supplies her surgery required.

Mickaela was born around 7:30 p.m., but the tiny premature baby wasn’t yet strong enough to maintain

A MIDNIGHT RIDE TO SAVE A LIFE

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Operation Blessing staff search desperately for a hospital to save a baby girl

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couldn’t believe that she would live. St. Damien’s did not have a bed

for Vilicia to stay in, and after all she’d been through, she was not well enough physically or emotionally to be there for her daughter. Thankfully, Operation Blessing’s headquarters in Haiti aren’t far from St. Damien’s. Vilicia was given a place to stay in the OBI guesthouse, and staff members brought milk from Vilicia to baby Mickaela every day — dedicated to this tiny babe’s survival. They took care of Vilicia, too. “We bought her a dress,” said Robenson, “we bought everything [that she needed] for her.”

As the weeks passed, hope began to grow in Vilicia’s heart. At four weeks Mickaela had grown to nearly three and a half pounds and no longer needed her incubator. It was at this point that Mickaela met her father for the first time. Though the baby girl had come a long way since her midnight motorcycle ride, Vilicia’s husband was still taken aback by her small size.

Over six weeks after she was born, Mickaela was finally able to go home with her family. Operation Blessing’s emotional and financial support, which had begun on

Mickaela’s tumultuous first night, didn’t end there as the family was provided with food and baby supplies to ensure that the needs of mother and baby continued to be met.

Baby Mickaela still gets regular checkups with help from Operation Blessing, and doctors marvel at how well she is doing. Thanks to your compassion, Robenson’s daring intervention and OB Haiti’s dedicated care, Mickaela is now a happy and healthy little girl. After his dramatic motorcycle ride, Robenson said, “Operation Blessing is helping people. I am a part of Operation Blessing, so I have to help others.”

Vilicia is certainly grateful for this unexpected help that reached her just when she needed it most. “Thank you Operation Blessing,” she said, “I would have died if you weren’t there for me. Both me and my baby would have died. ◆

•India, China and Nigeria top the charts for greatest number of preterm births.

•In 2013, nearly 1 million babies died due to complica-tions from being preterm.

•Of those 1 million deaths, a large number could have been prevented with modern medical care.*

her body temperature. The hospital didn’t have incubators, so the race was on to find one that did — and save Mickaela’s life.

Robenson took the tiny infant, weighing less than two pounds, and jumped on the only transportation available, a mototaxi (motorcycle), and sped off. The first stop was the Hopital La Paix, but Robenson and Mickaela were turned away as there were no incubators available. Once again, Robenson roared off into the night bearing his precious cargo and racing to beat the clock. “I held the baby in my arms and took another motorcycle to St. Damien,” he said. Finally, Robenson and little Mickaela arrived at St. Damien’s of Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs, a pediatric hospital on the other side of town. It was now 1 a.m. and baby Mickaela was safe at last.

The days and months that followed were full of ups and downs for the little girl and her family. Vilicia was released from the hospital three days after the surgery, but she remained in so much pain that she was unable to see her new daughter for several more days.

When the time came for their long delayed reunion, Vilicia was heartbroken at the sight of her tiny baby girl. Mickaela was so small and frail that Vilicia

"I would have died if you weren't there for me. Both me and my baby would have died." - Vilicia

DID YOU KNOW?

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*World Health Organization Preterm Birth Fact Sheet N°363 November 2015

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LOAVES & FISHES: Multiplying Your Donor Dollar

E arly this year when reports of Zika sweeping Brazil surfaced, I contacted our friends at

New Orleans Mosquito Control. In 2006, we partnered with them after Hurricane Katrina in stopping an an explosion of mosquito breeding in thousands of temporarily abandoned swimming pools. We used mosquito-eating fish called Gambusia and it was a huge success in stopping a looming epidemic of West Nile Virus and Saint Louis encephalitis.

I wondered if we could deploy mosquito fish all over Latin America

and help to stop Zika, but our friends explained that Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries Zika, is far more elusive than the ones we wiped out of New Orleans. They gave us a crash course in the life cycle of Aedes aegypti and then began teaching us methods that would work in countries less developed than the U.S.

In February, our OBI Latin American country directors began to launch awareness campaigns to teach people of where Zika comes from and what they could do to protect their families. We also

sponsored some conventional control methods like bed nets for pregnant women and fumigation.

Don Thomson, our national director of OB Japan, contacted me saying that he and his team wanted to help by calling on Sumitomo Chemical Company, a Japanese firm that is one of the largest manufactures of treated mosquito bed nets in the world. Bed nets are available everywhere, but the best ones, called Olyset nets, are manufactured by Sumitomo in multiple factories in Asia and Africa. Aedes aegypti

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Three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a Greek scientist named Archimedes explained the power of a lever this way: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth with it.”

A lever amplifies input force and provides greater output force. OBI’s platform hinges on a fulcrum of divinely-inspired purpose, so our resources are multiplied in wondrous ways that enable us to bless more people in more places; we call it our Loaves & Fishes strategy.

by Bill Horan, President of Operation Blessing International

Read more from Bill's Blog at ob.org/billBill's Blog

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mosquitoes usually bite during the day, but occasionally at night, plus pregnant moms struggling with fatigue often nap during the day. We wanted to do all we could to protect them, so I encouraged Don to look into the possibility.

Some years ago Sumitomo perfected a process to embed a synthetic reproduction of a natural insecticide found in chrysanthemums directly into the polyethylene fibers of the net. The chemical called Permethrin has been used globally for over 30 years and is non-toxic to humans but repels mosquitoes and kills those that land on it. Sumitomo

guarantees the chemical to work for at least five years. Another feature is that Olyset engineers designed the net’s openings with incredible precision: as large as possible, but just small enough to prevent mosquito entry. This makes a huge difference in air flow and therefore comfort and the willingness of villagers to use them.

Don explained our work in El Salvador to Sumitomo and how we are well positioned with the Ministry of Public Health there to import and distribute nets to pregnant women, even in the most remote areas. The company agreed to donate

8,870 nets, all we had to do was pay for shipment. In round figures, the nets were worth about $71,000 wholesale and over $100,000 retail. The cost of freight was under $4,000.

The way I look at it, on top of the primary benefit for unborn babies, by paying for the freight we were able to “earn a return on investment” of over 17:1. Every donor’s dollar provided at least $17 worth of lifesaving nets. We ultimately served almost 9,000 pregnant women instead of only 200 had we used that same $4,000 to buy the nets on the open market. Leverage is a beautiful thing!

Don is going to call on

Sumitomo again to show them photos, videos and newspaper articles about the free distributions happening all over El Salvador. I asked him to see if Sumitomo would be willing to donate another container of nets, this time for Honduras. An important aspect of why our strategy works is that we regularly supply corporate donors with great proof of performance. This primes the pump for more donations.

This is just a snapshot of OBI’s “Loaves and Fishes” leverage strategy — and how we multiply every dollar that you entrust us with. ◆

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Refugees continue to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe — some die on the trip, while most are stranded with no resources, no food and less hope for the future.

And while the European Union has a plan to help resettle these refugees, relocation efforts could take more than 100 years to complete* —

and these refugees cannot wait that long for help.

OB.ORG/CRISIS to learn how you can help.

SHE FLED WAR AND PERSECUTION Now she desperately needs your help.

*BRUEGEL.ORG, “EU MIGRATION CRISIS: FACTS, FIGURES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS,” FEBRUARY 12, 2016