The sadness of Joy.

WE LOST JOY, BUT WE WILL NEVER LOSE HOPE

Three years ago, we had to make a very tough decision about our Project in Nigeria. We were (and we still are) constantly struggling for funds to care for our children in the orphanage and we had to suspend our investigations of new cases of stigmatised, abused and abandoned children.

Before then, we used to rescue in average 7 children a year whose death was certain if we didn’t intervene and we supported many other cases which required only monitoring and educating their families and local communities.

I know that if funds were not a problem for us, today instead of close to 40 children in our Centre we would have 60 or more who would have escaped abuse, torture and death on the streets.

Even though we officially suspended our rescued missions, generally initiated after a call from someone denouncing the cases, during these last three years, we still could not avoid taking in four children.

The most recent one was Joy.

After receiving a call from someone with a terrible description of a child condition, our team headed immediately to a particular police station used as a reference in the call.

Once arriving to the place, our team crossed the road and found the child as it was described.

A little girl, about 8 years old, almost unconscious, laying on the floor where she had been for the past few days, ignored by all, including the police team from the station across the road.

Our team them crossed the road again and went to the police station to register the case and ask a written permission to take the girl away for treatment. For our amazement, the officers on duty didn’t want to register the case or sign any permission. After a long discussion we were given a verbal permission and we moved fast.

After trying to feed her and not being very successful, our team took the little one to the local hospital where she was admitted, placed immediately on a drip and had blood tests done. One of the various problems they confirmed was that the little and still nameless one was seropositive for HIV.

Long story short, when she recovered a bit of her strength, the hospital recommended us to take her to the University Hospital in the capital for a better treatment which we did but all of them seemed sure she was beyond help.

She started talking again, we managed to find out her first name, JOY. Where was the childhood joy in Joy’s life? We also found out the name of the community where she came from and we tried to track relatives.

Apparently, both parents had died and a stranger sheltered her and later she went missing from the community. Our team stood beside her in the hospital, tried to make her laugh, fed her with special soups, fruits. Doctors said she could not take much drugs because she would not cope with it as she was still very weak.

During the night, when she found energy she would scream strange names and would say lot of things that didn’t make sense. Then, they said they could not do much more for Joy and discharged her and asked us to take Joy home and just try to feed her slowly and see if she would recover and we did that.

It wasn’t long after arriving to our centre that on her bed Joy finally rested.

We believed till the end, we gave Joy our love and we saw her last smile that the world missed.

Please help us to give Joy the last respect and help us with donation to bury her.

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