John and Christi Barnes, missionaries with House of Moses in Port-de-Paix, were at the hospital Oct. 7, 2015 to visit a patient, when Christi saw Waldy. He was laying on the ground, unwashed and unloved. When she asked a nurse what was being done for him, she responded that she’d given him some water, Broyles said.

Treatable infections

No one is sure where Waldy’s life began, but it took a turn from where it was headed when he was unofficially adopted by the Barnes. Broyles flew Christi and Waldy to Port-au-Prince where he could get help. He ended up making multiple flights to and from his home with the Barnes to the capital city; some were helpful, some were not.

Waldy suffered from multiple infections along with a severe case of hydrocephalus. His brain was swollen from an infection as an infant–likely meningitis. In the U.S., such infections in children are treated early-on with antibiotics and rarely cause lasting damage. But Waldy was born in Haiti, and the infection wasn’t treated. Surgeons in Port-au-Prince would be able to put a shunt in Waldy’s head to drain fluid and relieve pressure, but first he would need to get there. That was where Broyles and MAF figured into Waldy’s treatment.

A flight of hope for a troubled boy

In the dry season, the Barnes’ home would have been six to eight hours by road from Port-au-Prince–an unpleasant journey with a sick 2-year-old. In the wet season, however, the trip is impossible by automobile. Broyles and his plane could make the trip in about 40 minutes. “I was delivering a pastor and coming back empty,” he said. “So I brought Christi and Waldy.” Waldy couldn’t be buckled into one of the seats, and Broyles didn’t have a stretcher. So the boy was bundled in a sleeping bag, and Broyles strapped him to the floor of the plane.

While Waldy was having surgeries and drug regimens performed, Christi was working to get a passport for Waldy and an emergency visa allowing him to travel to the U.S. for more complicated procedures, and adoption.

A trip from Haiti to the Lone Star state

Early in February, Waldy’s visa was approved, and he was put on a flight for Texas Children’s Hospital. Once in Texas, the tiny 2-year-old with the swollen head was adopted by Dustin and Lindsey Wood of Mansfield, Texas. He was renamed William Josiah Wood.

Broyles believes William “Waldy” would have died the same day he left Haiti, if he had not made the flight to Texas. While in Texas, Waldy suffered complications from infections. Despite prayers from those in Texas, Haiti,and across the USA, he died on Feb. 23. The Woods had a funeral Saturday at Rock Creek Baptist Church in Crowley, Texas.

How could God be using a 2-year-old?

The church was packed for Waldy’s funeral.

“We have a small building,” said Rock Creek pastor Rev. Doug Helms. “We’ll have 110 to 120 on a Sunday, but last Saturday we had 140 or more there for the funeral.”
Waldy began changing lives when the Barnes took him in back in October in Port-de-Paix, but his affect on peoples lives continued from the time he got off the plane in Texas, Helms said.

The Barnes got off the plane with Waldy and were standing in the baggage area. They were crying and praying and hugging him. The Woods were standing nearby, and they were crying and waiting for the Barnes to say their goodbyes. “Everyone in the area that day knew something special was happening,” Helms said.

Waldy started as a malnourished boy, desperately in need of help. No one would touch him because, in Haiti, it is accepted that if you touch a child in such a state, you become responsible for them. Doctors in Texas found that Waldy had a stomach infection. That could be dealt with, but he had been malnourished for too long prior to the Barnes ever meeting him. “By that day in October, he was already dying,” Helms said. Both the Woods and Barnes were there for Waldy in his final hours. Having arrived in Texas on Thursday, he died at the hospital 2 a.m. the following Tuesday.

There were so many hoops that had to be jumped through, both for the visa and for the adoption. It’s a process that often takes a year. His went through in about two months, he said. “On a Wednesday night prayer meeting about two months ago. Lindsey came to us. We’re praying that the Lord is opening the way for Waldy to come to us,” Helms said. “We made him a special matter of prayer. Why would God bring him to Texas but not allow him to even finish out a week here? I think God has used Waldy to open our eyes.”

Both Helms and Broyles noted that there are many children in Haiti who are in Waldy’s shoes. They are in desperate need of help.

“It was really amazing. Our family, the Wood and Barnes family — this little guy just touched people’s lives.”

This month, they connected the old Operating Room building to the new wing, demolishing a wall and relocating the scrub sink, launching the beginning of a new era for the team.

For the past eleven years, CURE Uganda has built trust and established a reputation for providing high-quality neurosurgical care for children. They're a specialty teaching hospital that treats the neurosurgical needs of children, with an emphasis on hydrocephalus, neural tube defects, spina bifida, epilepsy and brain tumors.

These new facilities, and Dr. Peter Ssenyonga's arrival, enable them to expand services to include adults also needing neurosurgical interventions. Right now, these life-saving operations are limited to Kampala (Uganda) and Nairobi (Kenya) and are prohibitively expensive for most East Africans.

Once the construction is completed, the CURE Uganda team will offer these services for much less than anywhere else on the continent. Two of the best trained neurosurgeons working with CURE, Dr. John Mugamba and Dr. Ssenyonga, will be taking on the anticipated workload along with an experienced staff. Roughly 65% have served with CURE for more than 5 years, and a quarter have been with CURE for a decade or more.

As a result of their reputation for quality care, patients are coming from all over Uganda, as well as Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, and DR Congo. Instead of Ugandans going to Nairobi for medical care, Kenyans are coming to Mbale. Referrals have come from as far away as West Africa and Mauritius.

CURE's goal is to have Ugandans treating Ugandans, provide the best quality medical care, and keep shillings in Uganda. That way, they're part of the solution to the healthcare question in Uganda.

Since it opened in 2000, more than 8,900 surgeries have been performed at the CURE Uganda hospital. CURE Uganda has evolved and grown into a leading hospital on the continent. Most importantly, their patients experience the life-changing message of God's love for them as they receive the surgical treatments they need.

Want to follow the story of one of the kids? Click here.

[For perspective, consider that in the United States,
Gross Domestic Product (a rough indicator of standard of living–the
market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a
given period) is $47,100, and in the UAE, it's roughly $48,200. Zambia's GDP is $1,200.]

Let's assume a very simplified argument that for young
people living in UAE, there's not much interest in finding out what "poor"
people do. On the other side of the
world, let's assume similarly that there's a prejudice about how "rich" people
live and behave. That's exactly what CURE International set out
to change, by getting people out of their comfort zones and showing them how the "other
half lives."

As a result, this foray has created a wonderful
relationship between the Zambians and Oasis Hospital (CURE's sister hospital in
the UAE). The warm hearts of the Emirati college students were
clearly shown by their recent project in Zambia.  

Oasis Hospital and
the Higher Colleges of Technology in Al Ain teamed up to bring 13 HCT students
to CURE Zambia, the hospital CURE manages in Lusaka. "We thought this would
be a good idea for these students as it is the first time, for many of them, to
travel outside of the Gulf region," said Trey Hulsey, Vice President of
Patient Relations at Oasis Hospital.

Hulsey also noted that "when people leave their
home settings, they're willing to look at things in a new way, regardless of
who we are. We have all these Muslim students leaving the UAE, being in a
new place and seeing Christians in a different way than they have ever seen Christians
before–or in a different setting." 

Both male and female
engineering, education, and foundation students were led by staff from Oasis
Hospital and a counselor from the Higher Colleges of Technology in Al Ain. The
students served the staff at CURE Zambia by taking on a large
administrative project, investing five days into sorting and organizing the
complex CURE Zambia filing system. Children and families that were recovering
from surgeries and other medical procedures received toys and visits from
the students as well.

Hulsey said the idea was to provide an interaction between
Muslims and Christians as a way of breaking down barriers and prejudices. It was
cultural exchange that benefited both the Muslim students and Christian staff.
"They can see that it's not
something that we give a return to investors, or that we try to live a better
lifestyle with it, that we use it to help other people who don't have as much
as they do."

Hulsey is hopeful that this will become an annual project. It opened a new dialogue. "One of the most
important things is that we are respectful to the people around us, and at the
same time, faithful to who Jesus is and what we believe He wants from us. These
are the things that allow us to work in places like the UAE, Afghanistan, and
Niger–predominantly Muslim countries." 

The trip was an investment in the character of the
students, noted Peter Kyalo, executive director from CURE Zambia. "[He] said to me, ‘You know, Trey,
investing in people takes time, and you don't see an immediate return. So we hope that as these students grow and
move on in their professional careers , they will be in positions of influence
and will remember what kind of things Oasis stands for and does."

On the tour of the children's
ward of the hospital, the group met a young boy with two clubbed feet, an
infant with a deformed leg, and a five-year-old child with hydrocephalus. At
this point, Mohammed, a student on the trip, excused himself from the tour
explaining that he couldn't see anymore of this. At the end of the week, the group
passed out toys donated by a doctor at Oasis Hospital, and Mohammed was the
first to be playing with the children.

It was a time of transformation; students were able to
build character through empathizing with children who were born with
deformities and diseases. Hulsey
said, "We found that when you show people what God's compassion and love looks
like, it's much easier to talk about it at some point in that relationship."

Keep praying for opportunities
for the seeds that were planted to grow. There's more about CURE here.

Day-to-day existence is the struggle for food and water, let alone
addressing medical needs like hydrocephalus, cleft lip and palate, spine deformities,
clubfoot, and other crippling orthopedic conditions that require highly
specialized attention.   

These conditions are treatable, but without CURE International, they have
nowhere to turn for proper care. Even
with CURE's presence, sometimes a hospital is too far for a family to go. So CURE takes the hospital to them via mobile
clinics. 

Kimberly Bennett is the CURE Advocacy & Zambia Field
Communications Specialist. She just
helped wrap up another orthopedics mobile clinic in Zambia last week as part
of a team assisting Dr. Giorgio Lastroni, CURE Zambia's consultant orthopedic
surgeon and medical director.  

They set up at the Mtendere Mission Hospital in Chirundu–a small town in
Zambia's Southern Province near the Zambezi River, just across the border from
Zimbabwe. While the hospital has an
excellent team of Italian and Congolese doctors, most of their surgeons are
general surgeons and are not able to perform complex or highly-specialized
surgeries.

This time, among the normal run of patients they helped were two people, a
man and a woman, who had been bitten by crocodiles while bathing in the Zambezi
River–a fairly common scenario.   

All in all, Dr. Lastroni saw over 20 patients in Chirundu and operated on
5. "I don't know if all the cases we worked on were a success," said Dr.
Lastroni as they drove back to Lusaka, "but we definitely gave it our all."

Stories like these keep CURE Zambia moving forward. This year marks the 5th anniversary of CURE
Zambia's official opening. Since CURE
Zambia opened its doors in December of 2006, their teams have performed 4,500
surgeries, 32 annual mobile clinics, numerous community awareness seminars, a
new ENT & Audiology clinic, and medical training sessions.

Why do it? It is an expression of God's
love. While not overtly evangelistic,
the staff and support team are followers of Christ, and everything they do is
in His name. When the inevitable
questions come, there's an open door to share their hope.   

Although you may be miles away, or have no medical knowledge to speak of, you
can still support their work. Find out
how you can pray, give, or go. Click here
for details.

In impoverished countries like Uganda, the likelihood of a child being born with a neurological disease, or procuring one shortly after birth, is much higher than in more-developed regions. Poor prenatal screening and maternal nutrition are just some of the causes leading to the increased risk of diseases like spina bifida or hydrocephalus (otherwise known as "water on the brain").

CURE Children's Hospital of Uganda specializes in neurological diseases like these. It's one of the very few hospitals who will accept patients with these diseases, because few hospitals in the country know how to treat them. Therefore, parents who do choose to continue seeking a cure for their children are not only shunned from their families, but they are often turned away from hospitals.

"Many hospitals and staff are indifferent to children like this," says Derek Johnson, executive director of the CURE International hospital in Uganda. "They feel helpless, and there's nothing they can do. So to find a hospital where the staff are professional and well trained, [who] love them and respect them the way they do, is priceless."

The hospital's exceptional care for their patients goes above and beyond anything in the country. Not only are surgeries offered free of charge, but love is spread to every patient and family as the hospital staff prays with them and shows genuine concern. With Christ at the center of all they do, the CURE staff reaches out to spread the message and hope of Christ to people who would receive no more than a sideways glance otherwise.

For the children who receive surgery, their lives are changed forever. Now that the CURE hospital in Uganda has been open for ten years, the staff has been able to see visible progress of children they helped years ago. Children who would otherwise be outcasts from society are instead living vibrant lives, thanks to surgery they had as an infant.

The girl pictured to the right is only one example. Eunice received surgery for spina bifida at the CURE hospital in 2003. Without treatment, very likely she would never have walked. But thanks to CURE, Eunice now goes to school and even plays sports.

CURE Children's Hospital of Uganda has seen over 25,000 patients and has performed over 7,700 surgeries; still, more could be done. Johnson says the unfortunate truth is that they see only a fraction of the children who need their help in Uganda.

"We estimate that we're probably seeing about between 20 and maybe 35 percent of the new cases that are born in Uganda alone. The fact is, we could do more if we had more."

Pray that the hospital would be provided with the resources to expand to help more children like Eunice. If you'd like to help, visit helpcurenow.org.

Pray also for stereotypes surrounding neurological diseases to subside.

"It's very much a spiritual war going on here," says Johnson. "There's a lot of evil attached to the stigmas against hydrocephalus and spina bifida."

Pray, ultimately, that people would turn to the Lord instead of witchcraft or superstition when confronted with this issue.

Dr.  Bransford is the recipient of the 2010 Dr.
Nathan Davis International Award in Medicine. Presented by the American
Medical Association (AMA) Foundation, in association with Pfizer Inc, the award
is part of the Excellence in Medicine Awards program and is presented to a
physician who has dramatically improved health care for an international
patient population. 

Dr. Bransford will be recognized at
the Excellence in Medicine Awards Ceremony in conjunction with the AMA National
Advocacy Conference in Washington, D.C.  Award recipients are honored for
their altruism, compassion, leadership and integrity. 

The legacy of Dr. Bransford is his work
with African kids with disabilities in and around Kenya. Bethany Kids, a ministry he established in
2001, annually performs over 1,000 operations on children suffering with hydrocephalus,
spina bifida, and other debilitating conditions.

"Dr. Bransford is the definition of
true selflessness," said AMA Foundation President Richard Hovland. "His
lifetime devotion to caring for children in places such as Kenya, Sudan and
Somalia has transformed the lives of so many. By establishing Bethany
Kids at Kijabe, his efforts will leave a permanent mark on Kenya." 

Together with his team in Kijabe,
they are dedicated to reaching the people with the Good News of Jesus Christ.