Erod holds onto the bars of his cot and smiles, oblivious to his own amazing survival story 10 weeks after being left to die in a mound of stinking garbage following Haiti’s earthquake.
Found in a chronically malnourished state, the 18-month-old boy was taken to a hospital in the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil where Doctors Without Borders (MSF) returned to run things after the Jan. 12 quake.
Weeks of intensive care meant the determined 18-month old clung to life against the odds in the nation with the highest infant mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere.
“At the moment, we are looking for a place for him so he can leave the hospital, but we don’t know where,” said Emmanuel Massart, a 28-year-old nurse from Belgium.
In a staggeringly poor country where an astonishing 40 percent of the population is under 14 and almost one in 10 children die before they are five, the future of the little survivor is very uncertain.
Like Erod, who has half a finger missing on his right hand and a blotchy hairless scalp because of the months of starvation that nearly killed him, many babies are abandoned by families who can’t cope with an extra mouth to feed.
Erod grasped the nurse’s thumb and then uncurled it with his tiny hand, smiling with bright eyes that suddenly let loose a stream of tears the moment he was placed back in his cot, alone.
Leaving soon for a public refuge to hopefully be adopted, Erod is not the main concern of doctor Manuel Dewez, whose ward is full of suspected cases of meningitis, malaria and gastroenteritis.
“Here is a little baby,” Dewez said, his understatement only clear when he pulled back the curtain.
A tiny, tiny face peered out from a bundle of swaddling cloths, eyes blinking, the hint of a smile.
This was the newest addition to the ward, Bechina, a boy born two or three months prematurely and weighing an astonishing 1kg.
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