So many tears have been shed these past couple days— tears of worry, tears of sadness, and plenty of tears of happiness! Today, I sat and wept with Walter’s mother who was so thankful for the cleft palate surgery he received at Hope of Life today.
As she wept, she shared the story of how many children in her village have died from complications due to cleft lip/palate. She wept as she remembered that 10 years ago, she was one of those very mamas who had lost a baby for this very reason. She wept as she reminisced of the day four years ago when she handed her one month old malnourished baby over to me. She couldn’t come with her baby because her husband wouldn’t allow it. When she ultimately refused to abandon her baby, he left.
When sleepy post-op Walter opened his mouth and she saw the new little palate, she wept again.
Today was all of the feelings.
In these remote areas of Guatemala, health issues are common and healthcare access is rare. On this #WorldHealthDay, I’m so proud of the work being done at Hope of Life to provide this basic human right to families who are unable to afford it but more than deserve it.
And more than ever, I am in awe at the beauty, the bravery, and the strength of these Guatemalan mamás. Providing what is a very basic service (in our eyes), is literally the life-changing help that keeps children alive and in their own families.
Thank You, God… for putting Your goodness on display through sweet little ones like Walter. 😭💞🙌🏻
I apologize for my absence, more on that in a moment. Let me give a very brief rundown of what The Saultons have been up to this past year!
+Covid hit in March 2020 causing a complete shutdown in Guatemala. Air travel, buses, and cars were forbidden to travel, meaning thousands of men and families were put out of work right in the middle of harvest season. Families who lived on a meager $2/day now lived on nothing. Malnutrition and poverty skyrocketed. For us, we worked hard to fill in needs around the ministry. Whitney worked 24 hour shifts every 2-3 days and on her off days, Bryan would fill in cooking at the senior center. John just bobbled around completely clueless of the havoc around him. Babies, man. 🙂
+After a few months of serving very long, difficult hours (24 hour shifts in full PPE in the 100 degree heat while in your first trimester of pregnancy is no joke), we were fortunate enough to get one one of the very rare flights being offered out of Guatemala at that time. “We’ll ride it out for a couple more weeks and then it’ll be over” or so we thought.
+On July 8, 2020 my best friend Jazmyn welcomed her beautiful daughter Kira into this world. Her birth was complicated by postpartum hemorrhage, a very sick newborn with a scary diagnosis, then an alarming health complication meaning Jazmyn needed to be admitted to the hospital without Kira. Being here in the states meant we were able to step in and help her husband Jordan care for baby Kira and their 2 year old son Zuri. God was so gracious and He truly answered all of our prayers in that season! Many tears were shed, but God was so good to all of us.
+On September 28th, Guatemala re-opened their borders, allowing air travel again. We booked return tickets for our family of three, excited to return home and give birth to Flori in Guatemala. Just 2 days before leaving, we discovered Flori was no longer growing due to placental insufficiency. Carrying the pregnancy much longer meant risking Flori’s life.
+October 12, 2020 we welcomed our precious Florence Jane into our arms. Tiny, but healthy, our 4.5 lb Flori was discharged after only 3 days in the hospital.
+Early November, back-to-back hurricanes hit Eastern Guatemala devastating rural communities, roads, and completely washing out a village at the base of Hope of Life’s campus.
+In December, my sweet buddy Yolanda passed away. She was a patient of mine that I have known for over 8 years! She is already deeply missed.
+We enjoyed Christmas and the new year with our family and babies. We missed out on seeing so many people because of pandemic + preemie baby + flu and rsv season… Please feel our love, hug, and presence despite our absence! I also dealt with some pretty brutal postpartum anxiety + depression. Listen, if you are dealing with the same, Jesus is wonderful BUT SO IS ZOLOFT. Through medication, Pink Stork mood support supplements, and pressing into The Lord I think I am finally better. Could that be hope I see on the horizon?!
+In a season of waiting for Flori’s passport, my precious Granddaddy passed away. He had just celebrated 70 years of marriage to my loving Grandmother. His health had been declining, but it was unexpected. However, he didn’t suffer and we were still in the states and able to see him and take him a prime rib dinner just one week prior. For all of those things, I am forever grateful and able to see God’s goodness even in the midst of our sadness.
+The end of February and the beginning of March were crazy! We finally received Flori’s passport, we were able to book airline tickets, and receive both of our Covid vaccines. Finally, some breakthrough in this past year that has felt suffocating and dark!
Which leads me to say… WE ARE HEADING BACK TO GUATEMALA ON WEDNESDAY!
I know the transition will be hard but we are still excited to get back. Our hearts are so invested in the work God is doing in rural Guatemala! The price to pay for having our hearts in two places is that it is hard to leave, but it is also hard to stay. Although it hasn’t always been comfortable or what we expected, we have also enjoyed this slow season of being in the states. We already so deeply miss our family– John and Flori will especially miss their cousins and grandparents!
Talking about what we do sometimes feels so weird. I never want the focus to be on us. I never want the focus to be “Oh, poor Guatemala… Thank God YOU were there to help THEM.” No, the glory is not ours to enjoy. The praise goes to God alone. We just goes where He has sent us. In the same vein, because we have so many amazing financial supporters and people who carry us in their prayers, I do feel responsible to let you all know about all of the exciting projects we have supported over the past several months. Through your generosity, we have been able to regularly supply a village of 100+ families with food bags every month. We have been able to minister to mothers and families who were once patients of mine, and helped coordinate medical care through Guatemalan missionaries who travel into the regions where we work.
We look forward to keeping you posted on when we get back home to Guatemala. We’ve been gone far too long and have so much work ahead of us. We are ready to get these hands dirty again.
Until then– stay healthy, stay masked…
And know that you are loved. -Whitney
It’s pretty impossible to reduce our time here to just a few pictures, but here are just a handful of the literal hundreds that have been taken!
One of our last photos as a family of 3 <3
We were able to see our amazing friends The O’Connors. Such a fun time seeing friends who fill our hearts and souls (and tummys!)
John and his BFF Zuri!
John and his Great Granddaddy John!
Welcome, sweet Flori!
Snuggles with Daddy
Flori and her Great Granddaddy
Our last picture with Granddaddy and of course John is picking his nose haha!
Precious girl
Christmas babies
How cute?!
Family of four!
John loved the snow!
Flori and her big cousin, Sarah Jo
Aunt Rachel is a pro-snuggler
So thankful for this whole group!
Proud big brother
… and an even prouder big cousin!
Kira and Flori!
Loved seeing our friend Kleinert and meeting Damian!
“Don’t forget to be faithful to do the thing you’ve been called to do. It’s easy to get distracted, much harder to stay focused. Nothing lasting is built without steadfast endurance, wisdom, & the ability to press through the unglamorous, unrecognized, unseen, & laborious middle.” Christine Caine
Today, and really just lately in general, have not been days that I want to place on the highlight reel of my life. Maybe it’s this season of being temporarily uprooted from our home and our work in Guatemala, maybe it’s the weird season we’re all in and all of the changes due to “the” virus, maybe it’s a little bit of a lot of different things… but today it all came crashing down on how I’m in this weird unseen middle. In my stubbornness and consternation, I sent myself to my room twice today until my attitude would improve– but that didn’t really happen until I stumbled across this quote from Christina Caine.
And I realized– I might not be where or who or what I want to be at this very moment, yet I am still called to be faithful.
For the past month, I have been grieving over sweet Brenda in the above photos. I was so worried about her returning home. Is she getting enough to eat? Is her mama doing therapy on her arm? Is she safe? I seriously thought of this precious girl ALL the time, and would whisper prayers for her safety throughout each passing day. At 3 1/2 years and only 13 pounds, her frail little body was shutting down when we received her. Could she survive the damaging effects of severe malnutrition? Miraculously, she nearly tripled her weight… but we had to discharge her to go home during a government shutdown and with the uncertainty of when we’d see or hear from her again. When I received word this evening that she doing well at home, nothing else mattered… not the things that I was mad about… nor the fact that I’ve experienced a lot of change lately and I’m just not good with changes. Knowing she was okay all of a sudden made everything with me okay.
Tonight was a beautiful reminder that when we are faithless, He is still faithful. In the anxiety and stress and confusion of this season, may we all be gently reminded of this.
She hadn’t been in for a follow up appointment, so we were all worried. We were already reeling from the difficult news of another patient who passed away, so we were naturally guarding our hearts and expecting the worst. We travelled for hours, climbed down a steep mountainside, crawled through a dangerous rocky ravine, and limbo’d through rusty barb wired fences to get to her.
We approached their home carefully, the whole time praying she would be healthy and safe. When her grandparents saw us, they burst into smiles. “Just wait til you see Santos!” her grandmother grinned. Immediately, all my fears subsided.
Her mamá walked out of their house made of palm fronds. Santos Cecilia was in her arms with the biggest smile on her chubby face and her little belly spilling out of the bottom of her shirt! She looked absolutely perfect! We got them set up with a follow up appointment, but I was so at peace seeing how she is thriving at home.
I wish all stories were this successful. My heart longs for a world where poverty and malnutrition don’t exist. But until we see things “on earth as it is in heaven” we will continue doing whatever it takes to bring help to the physically and spiritually starving. God, protect these children until help can arrive.💛🙏🏻
May 2019 – the first photo we received of Santos Cecilia asking us to help. She was a month old and weighed under 5 pounds.
January 2020! Santos (mamá) and baby Santos CeciliaMay 2019 – Santos Cecilia’s familyDr Kyon Hood, his wife Victoria, and their family sponsored Santos Cecilia’s rescueWhat a difference several months can make!
“How sweet! She looks so healthy with her chubby cheeks!”
Sometimes malnutrition is easy to spot– a three month old clocking in at only 3 pounds, her ribs prominent, her crying only consoled by a bottle of milk that she quickly consumes.
But in other cases, malnutrition can be very difficult to detect to the untrained eye. Clothed and standing on a scale, a child can sometimes meet all the criteria to be deemed ‘healthy’, but through skillful assessment and observation, you can gain a more accurate picture of what is going on ‘beneath the surface.’ This type of malnutrition is silent and insidious and is claiming the lives of many children here in remote Guatemala. Hope of Life is fighting daily to reverse the statistics.
So, heads up… NERD ALERT. This purpose of this blog post is to give a little bit of medical perspective to what we see and treat daily here in Guatemala. Today, I am only focusing on the two types of acute malnutrition we treat most often here in rural Guatemala– Marasmus and Kwashiorkor.
We’ve all heard the cheesy story about the starfish, right? Here’s a condensed version — a father and son are walking along the beach, and there are hundreds of starfish that have washed ashore. The starfish are dying because they are out of water. The kid begins throwing them in one by one, the dad makes a remark about how ‘you can’t save all of them’ and the kid replies ‘yeah, but I saved that one.’
I’ve come to realize how true that really is. A few weeks ago, I shared on my instagram a story of the ripple effect that helping others has. I’ll share it below:
Several months ago, Hope of Life rescued a little baby girl named Estefani. She was malnourished due to feeding problems related to a birth defect. Months later, she is healthy and now awaiting a surgery date to repair her double cleft lip and palate. Her precious mama told us about her neighbors who just gave birth to two tiny, precious twin girls. “They are chiquititas, como Estefani!” she reflected on when Estefani was first admitted into our care. Yesterday, Hope of Life arranged for the little 4lb babies to be brought in. They are our third set of twin girls this year, and I’m so proud of Estefani’s mama for making us aware of them. This is why you do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. Helping others is not some sort of debilitating crutch that leads them into a life of dependancy… Rather, giving help is an extension of your hand to lift them out of their current situation. If it is done in grace, love, and with some education, it can truly change future generations. Empowered people empower people. [Acts 20:35]Continue reading How to Save the World
“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” -William Wilberforce
Today was Yennifer’s “going home” day. As morbid as this may sound, I never thought we would see this day.
I remember vividly the day she was brought in. I wasn’t even sure she was alive at first. She was 6 years old and only weighed 9 pounds. “How is this even possible?” I thought to myself.
Her skin was dry and flaking off in areas, her pulse was thready and beating at 38 beats per minute, her breathing slow and still. I choked back my own tears as we undressed her to do a full assessment. She didn’t stir, she didn’t fight, she didn’t even wince. She was much too weak for any of that. Continue reading This is rural Guatemala.
