While Christmas shopping with my daughter last December we saw something that changed our lives. There was a poster on the counter of a shop in Overland Park, KS of a disheartened black girl missing both of her hands. Nellie was the one to draw my attention to the photo. In moments I was interrogating the store owner about the mission and what it was all about.
Within 48 hrs. my family travelled to a small town in Mo. to hear Lonny Houk discuss the need in Sierra Leone. I saw slides that captivated me. Such desperation and despair ...before I knew it I was a volunteer for Feed My Lambs Intl. and Hands Across the Water, Medical Mission to Sierra Leone. While praying for the mission in January, the Lord laid it upon my heart to consider taking one of these needy children into our home.
Lonny agreed to bring me a girl, but God had other plans. We ended up with not one child but two, not girls but boys...I love it. And these updates are just my way of documenting the hand of God moving in our lives.
Blessings, Ann Vanasse
Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission
March 14, 2001 Raymore, MO - Three war-wounded children from Sierra Leone will be arriving in Kansas City on Thursday, March 15, 2001. Lonny Houk, founder of FEED MY LAMBS INTERNATIONAL, will arrive with the children, along with the reporter and photojournalist from the Kansas City Star, who accompanied the medical team. The other team members returned last Wednesday. The children have been brutalized by Sierra Leonian rebels in the war-torn country. FMLI is spearheading Hands Across the Water, a mission to help provide medical care to prepare amputees for prosthetic limbs to those who have been traumatically amputated by the rebel forces.
The children, two boys, 6 and 10, and a girl, 13, have been granted medical visas, and have been brought to the US by FMLI, working with Kansas City Sister City Program, Bowes Price Chopper, Northwest Airlines Air Cares Program, Harmony Elementary School, Leawood Elementary School, Senator Dennis Moore's office, and many other humanitarian groups and individuals to begin medical treatment and rehabilitation. The girl, Howa Kargbo, is a bi-lateral upper extremity amputee, who will require stump revisions involving multiple surgeries. One boy, Frances Ngandor, will require multiple plastic surgeries which will enable him to regain the use of his badly scalded hands and arms. The second boy, Salifu Sesay, is to be treated neurosurgically to repair a skull wound caused by a machete blow to his head. These will be followed by occupational and physical therapy to help regain life skills.
Dr. Dan Schaper, an Olathe orthopedic surgeon, along with Olathe nurses Marsha Reglin and Jan O'Dell, a surgical nurse formerly of Lawrence, a surgeon from Alabama, and an assistant from Montana, volunteered to go to Sierra Leone at their own expense to perform surgeries and evaluate patients for possible prosthetic fittings. Kansas City, MO, and Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, have been sister cities since 1974. Sierra Leone has been engaged in a brutal civil war for 10 years. As a result of this armed conflict, militant rebels have committed many atrocities including mutilation of many children and adults who have had hands and legs amputated with machetes.
Houk and the children will be welcomed at KCI when they arrive on Northwest Airlines flight #461 at 4:24 p.m. Thursday, March 15, 2001.
The team included Lonny Houk, administrator, Drs. Dan Schaper and Carl Albertson, nurses Jan O'Dell, Marsha Reglin, and Sara Houk, and administrative assistant Tom Collins. KC Star coverage was submitted by Malcolm Garcia and Joe Ledford.
For more information, please see our website at http://www.fmli.org