Heart Healing

This is Glory - just back from Johannesburg. He attends the cardiology clinic I run in Queens. We referred him 18 months ago for repair of his congenital heart disease... and 3 weeks ago he went, courtesy of the Government of Malawi. He's a lucky boy - in another year or 2 his heart would have been irreparable and he would have died of heart failure in his early teens. Now, with his heart healed in the Walter Sisulu Paediatric Cardiology Centre, his life expectancy is normal. Only 4 or 5 children a year from our clinic get a chance like this.

According to the Bible, healing a heart (i.e the core of our spiritual being) is also a tricky business - "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9. We tend to reject the urgent healing we need from Jesus - "This people's hearts have become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they...might understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them" Matthew 13:5. But if only we have the humility to ask Him, He can make our hearts new - "Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me" Psalm 51:10.

Barcelona!

Phone call from UNICEF offices on Monday, 0730: “Neil can you fit in a visit from the director of Barcelona Football Club on Wednesday afternoon? He wants to visit the Blantyre Child Protection Team”
Neil (thinking shirts signed by Messi, tickets for the Nou Camp etc): “I think I could squeeze it in...”

Turned out to be the director of ‘la Fundació’ – the charity set up by Barca supporting projects all over the world. Rather than take money from sponsors, the team wear shirts with ‘UNICEF’ on the front of them. Profits from the shirt sales go mainly to HIV/AIDS and children’s work in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr Marta Segú had heard about what was happening in Blantyre and asked for a visit.

The picture shows members of the Child Protection Team (Including a magistrate, social workers, 2 community child protection workers, a police victim support officer and me, together with some of the UNICEF staff team). We didn’t get any shirts, but we did get a pendant to hang in the office of the new ‘One-stop centre’ when it’s built in Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital!

For more details on the work of the foundation follow:

http://www.fcbarcelona.cat/web/Fundacio/english/nacions_unides/convenis/unicef/index.html

Partnership to Protect Children

In January a group of experts in child protection from New York spent 2 weeks in Malawi helping us to examine the (many!) gaps in the existing system. Below is a photo of us all meeting with the UNICEF country representative. Malawi has no functional child protection system as we would recognise it in the West. But the need is enormous. We see at least 10 girls a month coming to us because they have been raped. It’s estimated that one in four of all girls in Malawi have unwanted sex by the age of 16.

Over the last year we’ve started a multi-disciplinary team in Blantyre, linking social workers, police and medics together to support the children we see. During the visit of the team, we met with colleagues in Lilongwe and Zomba to encourage them to start doing the same thing. The problems to solve are legion – not enough fuel for social workers to visit a home, not enough phone credit for regular communication between the agencies, inadequate laws, magistrates and prosecutors who don’t understand the typical pattern of sexual abuse, doctors who don’t know how to interpret medical evidence correctly etc etc.
But the team’s visit was a good reminder of just how far we’ve come. I now know Dominic (the director of social services in Blantyre) and Emmanuel (the Police victim support officer) and Edward (the Supreme Court judge) as colleagues. We’ve had great support from UNICEF. We talk to each other, plan services for victims together and little by little, things change.

God calls us to be salt and light in a rotten and dark world – pray we’d be faithful to that calling!