Milk Program: a desparate fight

We have a little boy named Rogelio Peliz in the ASELSI Milk program. He is 1 year and 8 months old and only weighs 14 pounds and a quarter. He has been in the 14 pound range now for 4 months.

Despite our constant attempts to educate his mom on how many ounces of milk/vitamin fortified drinks he should have each day, how much he should be eating, bottle sanitation and etc., she still insists that her son is content and doing fine only drinking 4 ounces of milk ALL day and only eating a very little bit of food.  That is right…this little boy is only receiving 4 bottles of milk a day with 1 ounce in each bottle.  His mom often puts him to the breast to breastfeed him when he cries, but he almost instantly seems to fall asleep due to the mother having little or no breast milk anymore.  He is being pacified by her attempts to breastfeed and stops crying, but is receiving little or no nutrition the several times a day she gives him the breast instead of the bottle.

This mother of four thinks he is doing fine and says one of her older daughters used to be small like him too and now is just fine. It may be true that her other daughter beat the odds and is now doing ok, but she is relying more on her previous experience with her daughter than on what us nurses and our growth chart is telling her.

Even though I have persistently told her that her son could die if he doesn’t get more to eat and drink, she seems convinced that he is doing fine.

I have a feeling that even though one of her daughters used to be a small baby as well, with the lack of healthcare and charting for children here, she probably has no idea of how much her daughter weighed as a baby compared to how much her very malnourished son currently weights.

Today, I collaborated with the other nurses at the Milk Program to start an intervention with a local governmental health agency here, to assess the situation closer in order to help save the life of this child.

Please pray for Rogelio to gain weight,  for the mother to understand the seriousness of his situation, for wisdom for us here on how to help him further and for God’s blessing over this family.