In order to understand MaKayla’s story, it is necessary to go back in time for a few minutes to the beginning of Allie’s story. In January of 2005 I had just finished and released Dr Mom’s Healthy Living and was preparing to go on the lecture circuit to generate book sales and pay back debts that I had promised to take care of. However, in the first week of January, I discovered that my husband, who is diabetic, was extremely ill. He was in the Philippines with two of our sons working on a project there, so I took my two youngest daughters (ages 12 and 16) and went to the Philippines to take care of him and help him get back on his feet.

 

A couple of months later, when he had recovered, I told my daughters they had a very unique opportunity to do some volunteer work in a third-world country, so, one Sunday afternoon, our landlord took us to visit a couple of orphanages to see if the girls could work in one of them. 

 

The first orphanage we visited had older children in it (ages 4 and up). As we walked through the humble facility and visited with the children, the lady in charge shared one horror story after another with me – things I began to wish I had never heard. One of the stories she shared involved a family of three children – 2 girls and a boy. All three of which were in the orphanage. She said they had been found in a field where they had been abandoned after their mother died – the boy who was about 4 years old was seen first – he was sitting in the field eating dirt. His hair was white due to extreme malnutrition. They then discovered his two sisters – one, an infant, was almost dead due to starvation and exposure – the second, a young girl about 6 years old was bleeding to death because someone had come by and sodomized her.

 

As we walked through the orphanage I asked her where the babies were? She said, “Well, many of them are thrown away.” At first I thought she was joking, so I turned to her and said, “That’s not funny”. She said, “No, but it is true”. Apparently, due to extreme poverty, disease, and lack of space or access to an orphanage, many children are just abandoned – thrown in a river, left in the jungle or just thrown in dumpsters. I was shocked! 

 

It is so easy in our typical middle class lives in America to be completely ignorant of what is going on in the world around us – many of us live out our lives wrapped up in careers which pay for the comfortable house, car, and other amenities which we consider necessary and normal – while many others in the world would just be grateful for a roof over their heads or something to put in their stomachs. After all, it’s not really our problem. Even when we watch the infomercials about ‘Save the Children’, it is easy for most of us to stay detached – quite often we wonder how much of it is real and how much is hype. We wonder if the small amount of help we give is even getting to the children or if it is being given to all of the middle men in between. Now I was standing in an orphanage in a third-world country realizing that not only is it real – it involves real children with real lives which are quite often very sad and tragic – children just like our own – who are beautiful, bright, energetic, hopeful – who just need a chance.

 

I asked her if she knew of any orphanage which takes in the babies – she knew of one, so she told me how to get there. When we arrived, we were greeted warmly and taken to the infant room. Just like you see on those infomercials, there was a pad on the floor which ran along the wall with babies lined up on it lying next to one another. As I visited with the woman in charge, I started picking up babies and holding them. They were lying on the pad in just a cloth diaper – no air-conditioning, no clothes, no swings, no infant seats – just a pad with a sheet laid across it with infants laying on top.

 

As we talked, she pointed out one of the infants who was paralyzed on the right side of her face. She was about a month old, weighed less than 4 lbs and had multiple problems. Because of the work I do and the books I have written, I started giving her suggestions on some things she could do to help her. She asked where she could get some of the herbs I described and I told her I had some with me. As my husband and I got ready to leave, she picked the baby up, handed her to me and said, “Why don’t you take her home for a week and see if you can help her?” So, at the ages of 61 and 50, my husband and I walked out of the orphanage that day with a one month, four pound baby who was dying. As we were leaving the orphanage, I asked the lady what she was feeding her so that I could get the same thing and not upset her system. She looked at me and said, “Oh, you would never feed her what I have to feed her. Due to lack of funds, I can’t give her much more than sugar water.”