katie loves haiti: Pray for Rose Mitchel

I apologize that I don't have any interesting news or stories to report tonight. The story of my life the past few days has been organizing, cleaning, packing things up, and playing with kids. I'm still working away at sorting everything in the "baby room" and preparing to repaint it. After I started this undertaking, I realized that the nannies have been hoarding blankets, clothes, toys, etc in the baby room. For some reason they have a habit of doing this. They don't understand that we want the children to wear the nice clothes that people send for them. They dress the kids in rags (literally clothes with holes!) and hide the nice clothes.

So, cleaning out the baby room lead to several other side projects. I ended up also sorting all of the boys clothes downstairs and throwing away anything stretched, faded, or ripped. Then, I gathered up all the clothes from the nannies' secret stock pile and told them they MUST let the kids wear them! I love our nannies to death, but their lack of education coupled with the vast cultural differences can often be VERY frustrating to say the least.

I am pleased to say that the dresser and shelves in the baby room are empty and the closet is almost finished, too. I'm hoping that I might actually be able to start priming the walls tomorrow afternoon.

I would like you all to please keep Rose Mitchel in your prayers. If you don't know, we got her straight out of the hospital. She was 9 months old and only 9 pounds. She has AIDS and spent a long time in the hospital. Up until today she was improving rapidly and gaining weight and strength. She just had her 1st birthday and is up to 16 pounds. She is finally strong enough to pull herself up into a crawling position and rock back and forth on all fours. We hope that she will soon be crawling. The bad news is that today, her heart rate was sky high, her O2 level was low, her temperature was fluctuating up and down, and she was coughing a lot. Dorothy listened to her lungs and suspected that she has pneumonia. Really, any type of virus or infection could be fatal to Rose Mitchel given her situation: AIDS and malnourished.

After losing our precious Leila to a bad infection recently, we were not taking any risks. We immediately called our pediatrician, Dr. Pierre-Louis, and took Rose Mitchel to the hospital. I prayed for her a lot this afternoon and was pretty worried. She came back home in the evening. The hospital said it is not pneumonia. They gave her three nebulizer treatments while she was there, and they instructed us to continue giving them every 6 hours. We are still quite concerned though, because she does not seem to be doing any better. Please keep this precious baby girl in your prayers!