The Amazing Plaster House. Don's entry.

We recently visited the most incredibly fabulous place - The Plaster House.

They have expanded greatly after starting in a small space with 9 broken hospital beds from Selian Lutheran Hospital where I work. They provide a loving, nurturing, healing environment for children who face overwhelming and, in some cases, potentially fatal health issues They go out to rural villages and ask about children who need their help.  They found that the best source of information was to ask school children if they knew of such children after showing them pictures of severe burns, club feet and cleft palates. After taking care of over a thousand children last year, they are going to scale back to "only" 700 children this year due to restructuring and a large building expansion project part of which is seen above.

The process of healing is a long one.  First, the Plaster House has to deal with co-existing health problems like malnutrition, severe anemia, chronic infections and the accompanying emotional scars. This can take months.  Then the surgery or, often as not, a series of surgeries with post-surgical wound care. The need for such care quickly became evident with hospital-based care when follow appointments would be missed or children would come back with damaged, filthy casts.  (These children often come from isolated villages with limited resources.)

Club foot reconstruction is a complicated orthopedic surgical procedure for an older child.  For a baby with flexible ligaments and tendons and soft bones, it is a matter of a series of casts to gently and progressively rotate the foot around. It is "easily" done, but the trick is to find them early; outreach is critical.

Cleft lip and palate is not just disfiguring.  It can be lethal.  Since the normal architecture of the mouth is disrupted, feeding is compromised and there is a daily risk of milk going down the wrong tube.  Aspiration pneumonia can kill children especially if they are also malnourished. As you can imagine, the recovery process after such surgery is complicated requiring at least of month of care at the Plaster House.

The most gut-wrenching, heart-rending problem is the burns.  The Maasai live in simple houses with wood fires in the middle of the house for cooking.  Toddlers fall into boiling pots and the fire itself.  Any burn is traumatic, but we heard of a particularly horrifying case of a boy who had uncontrolled epilepsy resulting in 3-4 seizures every day.  One day when mama was outside, he had a seizure and fell into the fire.  Nobody was there to pull him out quickly.  One arm was so damaged that it had to be amputated.  His face was basically burned off. He had innumerable surgeries, including one series where a nose was constructed on his forearm, allowed to mature, then transplanted into the hole in the middle of his face.  The whole process was a 4 1/2 year, Herculean process of restoring a damaged boy.

It was a delight to see a spirited soccer game played by children limping around with casts, crutches, and walkers. This is a magical place unmatched by Disneyland, a safe place for healing kids to just be kids.

Notice the beautiful view of Mt. Meru in the background.

Since school-aged children spend months and years at the Plaster House, they need education.  The Plaster House operates their own school.

The loving and caring is evident everywhere: from the staff, from the volunteers, from the children themselves.  It doesn't matter if you are only 9 years old with orthopedic problems of your own, you can help a 5 year old.

Don