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My family spent 2.5 years in a
remote village up the Sepik River about
240 miles from the end of the road coming
out from Wewak. Our work there
consisted of education and development
with the intent of establishing a
thriving church. Although we were
not trained nurses we did have some
training for bush medicine and had many
opportunities to help the
people.
 One child that became very
special to us was Leslie, the adopted son
of our close friend and village leader,
Akan and his wife
Nenyaki.
Leslie had been brought to Akan
and his wife shortly after birth and as
Nenyaki was not nursing at the time, she
attempted to feed him with some formula
that Akan had purchased on one of his
last trips to town. Since Akan was
a business man dealing with crocodile
skins he had enough money for such
luxuries but unfortunately Nenyaki could
not read the instructions on the can and
her method of mixing the formula was
simply to put enough in the water to make
it white.
Also, Nenyaki was not too
careful with where the bottle was
left. It was often laying around on
the floor of the cooking area where the
dogs and children played. And she did not
know to boil the water and the bottle to
make sure it was sterile.
Needless to say it was not long
before little Leslie was a very sick
little boy. By the time my wife Elana
realized what was happening Leslie had
diarrhea and was severely dehydrated. On
top of all this it appeared as if he had
malaria as well. Poor Leslie was so
listless he did not respond in any way to
a bottle. There appeared to be no
suckling response left in his poor little
frame.
Elana immediately realized that
we were looking at a child that was not
going to make it though the night without
a dedicated effort and perhaps come
miraculous intervention. 
Thankfully Akan and Nenyaki were
able to be persuaded to let us have
Leslie and begin to try to dehydrate him
by force feeding with an
eyedropper. The first night we
could see that Akan and Nenyaki were
quite agitated and so we invited them to
sleep on mats on our living room
floor. They gratefully
accepted. Throughout the night
Elana and Tawnie, a student staying with
us, took shifts and tried to get the life
saving liquid down little Leslie's
throat. By morning things didn't look
much different but Leslie was still
alive!
Elana spent the morning teaching
Nenyaki how to sterilize the water and
the bottle and mix the formula and she
let her take a few of the day shifts. The
second night Akan and Nenyaki were much
more comfortable leaving Leslie with us
and they slept in their own home which
was quite near ours. Somewhere during the
night it became apparent that Leslie was
getting stronger. He seemed to sleep much
more peacefully and Elana got a bit of
sleep right beside him.
 By the morning after the second
night we felt that Leslie was definitely
out of danger and beginning to get much
stronger. We turned him back over to
his mother and rejoiced that God had
allowed us to have a hand in saving this
precious life. Leslie ended up
growing to be one of the fattest little
boys in the village. As you can see from
some of these pictures, the diapers might
have been a bit big but it didn't take him
long to grow into them.
He is now a happy member of
Akan's family and will have better care
due to the fact that Nenyaki decided to
listen and learn a better way. Below is a
picture of their fine family all dressed
up for church. 
There are so many cases like
this where the families have no hope
because they do not have anyone to turn
to. There are literally hundreds of
villages like this that do not have any
services and that do not have airstrips
or even the river to make travel
possible. So much of the time all we
could do was cry when we would get
requests for help from the remote
interior villages. Sometimes a
delegation of villagers would travel for
days to come to our home and ask for us
to send someone to help their
village.
We are praying that soon Mission
Support Network will be able to serve
these villages that are spread all over
this forgotten land.
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