“Mackenson… This baby began losing weight, but his mother thought it was due to a curse.”

Little Mackenson Jean often cried himself to sleep due to hunger. He was just a baby, not even a year old. Little Mackenson is from the village of Belle Fontaine, high in the mountains of Haiti, where Love A Child began working many years ago. In this village, when the people are sick, they go to the witch doctor… there is no doctor or clinic here.

Mackenson’s mother works a tiny garden she had planted in hopes that it would grow food… she would spend all day here and leave Mackenson and three other children with his young brother. When their mother leaves, the baby’s eight-year-old brother prepares “bread soup” for him and his siblings and Mackenson to eat, but the baby often spends “days without food.”

Their mother comes home late from the garden with nothing in her hands. She then prepares “saltwater soup” for her four children. This is simply “wild leaves, boiled water, and salt.” There is no vitamin content in this “soup,” but it is just something to “put in their stomachs.” This makes the children “rest the night and wait for daylight to come.”

Madamn Jean had five children, but one died from an unknown reason. When Mackenson got “very sick,” she never realized he had malnutrition, so she spent all her money on a witch doctor, who only made matters worse. She finally thought she would just “abandon baby Mackenson,” because he was getting sicker.

The day she brought him to our clinic, the baby was so frail and near death that the doctor rushed him immediately to our Malnutrition Clinic. He was “too weak to cry.” When he first arrived at the Malnutrition Clinic he weighed 4 kg (about 8.8 pounds), and now he weighs 4.8 kg. He loves to eat, loves to laugh, is gaining weight, and soon, his mother will be able to take him home, “with food that we will send with her.”

Missionaries Bobby and Sherry Burnette