weight gain

It's amazing how quickly emotions can change and I can swing from sobriety to giddiness. On Wednesday, only days after the experience which led to my previous blog entry, I went to one of the BBB outpatient nutrition programs, as I do almost every Wednesday. This was the 10th week of the program, meaning that the 17 children who enrolled on the first day had finished their cycle and were getting their last food. At these distributions I usually have a mix of emotions as some kids gain weight and some lose weight, and seldom does anyone show a perfect upward trajectory. Gain some weight one week, lose some the next; sometimes I've wondered if the food we're giving is really doing any good.

So this week, I looked back over the data for the kids who had finished the program. As I posted previously, the primary criteria for enrollment is that the kids are between 70-85% weight-for-height, so I rechecked their weight for length at the end of the 10 weeks. I was thrilled to see that all but one of them was over their target of 85% weight-for-height, even those who showed relatively modest weight gains. Even more exciting, though, was the proportion of them that were over 100% weight-for-height! 100%! That means that these malnourished kids are at a healthy weight, which, seeing them at the start of the program, is a lot more than I could have hope for, or guessed might happen. While I haven't compiled all the numbers, it was around 5 of them who broke the 100% line, and probably another 4 who were close.

I was overjoyed. As I went through the weights with Heidi, I was almost giddy, laughing as I recorded their current weight-for-heights in their medical records books. Seldom have I felt better about the world than when I saw that these children were gaining weight and no longer met malnutrition criteria. When I got home and people asked me how Busaru was, I replied "It was awesome!" (let's just say this was a surprising response). The world looked beautiful. That's the breadth of emotions I can experience in a span of three days, and they are always in tension. The deep feeling that the world is fundamentally wrong, and the giddy rejoicing at the beauty of life. Of course I treasure and strive for the later, but I'm becoming convinced that both are fundamentally true, that both reflect the nature of the world. We live in a place of brokenness and beauty.