Please Help

Angeline has been our friend from the very first week we spent in Dano to this day. She has worked for us, cleaned our dishes, cleaned our toilet, washed our floors, baked our bread, and served us in many other ways.

She's always been grateful for the income we have provided for her, but was never satisfied to just work at our house and has always either sold ice or sacks of water in the market on market days and done many other little things to try and fight for a better existence for her three boys and now her daughter (see the picture above) whom she named after my wife, Andrea.

Her service to us in our home has made an incalculable impact on our ability to stay on the mission field and in the ministry to which God has called us.

She is currently in severe danger. We don't know yet what all the root causes for her disease are, whether it was somehow related to her pregnancy (she gave birth to Andrea Dorcas Some about 5 months ago) or something else. What we do know is that she has progressively gotten worse over the last couple of months.

She had a few pointless stays in the Dano hospital, and yet she still had fever constantly and was developing severe anemia and going into multiple organ failure when I rushed her to the hospital on Friday. The Belgian doctor, Dr. Peter van Dingenen, to whom I brought her quickly diagnosed a few things that we could treat, but knows that she is dealing with multiple issues.

She's now had 4 blood transfusions in the last few weeks and will probably need another in the next 24 hours. She has an enlarged liver and spleen. She needs lots of testing and lots of attention to get to the bottom of this, and Dr. Peter has volunteered to do lots of followup work on her, but even the public hospital in Ouaga is more than she can afford and is understaffed anyway.

She would not even be able to go there were it not for the help we and others are providing her. Even so, the hospital has let her go without prescribed medication and much needed testing because she thought the money wasn't there for it (we had sent her more, but it hadn't arrived in her hands yet).

The doctors at the public hospital cannot keep up with all their patients, and every time Dr. Peter has gone to check on her there is a different doctor there and Dr. Peter has to bring him up to speed. Dr. Peter will some day, by God's grace, have a more proficient clinic to deal less expensively with cases like hers, but suggested off-handedly to me that if she had 1,000,000 CFA (about $2,000.00) she could get into a private clinic and start getting more consistent and focused care.

They are testing for many things right now; the scariest possibility is some form of blood cancer. Regardless she needs everyone to pray hard right now that God would heal her body. We are also praying that if it will make the difference between discovering what is wrong with her and thus saving her life, that God would then call his people together to provide for her the means to pay for a private clinic.

Would you please join us in praying to God, our provider, the great physician, to provide all of her needs?

If you are able, please make a small donation to help us get Angeline the help she needs.