Little Samira’s Recovery

One of our Stabilisation Centre Supervisors told me a truly inspiring success story this week regarding our work up in the North East, and so for this blog I would like to share it with you…

Little Samira is 4 years old and lives with her parents in Koroboshanan, a couple of kilometers away from Elwak town. She is the second born in a family of 3 siblings; her brothers and sisters are alive and well.

Faced with anguish of her child’s deteriorating health conditions (anorexia, weight loss, mouth ulcers, fever and prolonged cough), Samira’s mother thought her daughter’s life was coming to an end. She walked several miles to seek attention from Save the Children’s outreach nutrition services, where a proper referral was made to our stabilisation centre in Wajir.

The day little Samira arrived in Save the Children’s Stabilisation Centre in Wajir she was very sick, too weak to bear therapy and was even unable to retain our therapeutic feeds for the first day, because of an abnormality in her body that was preventing the absorption of food nutrients. Samira’s condition required close supervision by our team there, in order to monitor her progress, her feeding and medications were given to Save the Children’s standards and her clinical improvement was being checked regularly.

Little Samira responded marvelously to Save the Children’s integrated management and recovered well from her long-term illnesses. A smiley and energetic Samira is now ready to go back home to her family and carry on with her life. Save the Children will continue to help Samira’s progress through home-based treatment such as using specially formulated ready to use food, like Plumpynut, for severely malnourished children through our Outpatient Therapeutic Programme.

Save the Children’s team in Wajir have brought hope and a future to the life of this beautiful young girl. This wonderful success story has been passed on to the whole Kenya Programme and it has not failed to inspire every single colleague here. I hope it inspires anyone reading this too.