Missionaries strive to save the children

Almost half of the 2.4 million orphans in Tanzania lost parents to AIDS. Alone, they face hunger, disease and despair.

Story by Veronica Torrejón Photography by Harry Fisher | Of The Morning Call

Fifth of a six-part series

At the Moravian Church cemetery in the Tanzanian village of Sikonge, overgrown weeds hide the stones ringing mounded graves.

All but lost in the tangle of prickly shrub is a small lump in the ground where, presumably, an infant lay buried. Jabbed into the ground is a crude cross fashioned from wooden slats. The cross bears no inscription, no name.

In a country with an infant mortality rate of 76 for every 1,000 children born, birth and death often are cloaked in routine.

The routine is dishearteningly familar at a clinic not far from the graveyard. Nurses there fight to save newborns from HIV, the virus killing their mothers. A sign at the clinic reads: Tunza mtoto taifa la kesho . It means, take care of the child, the nation of tomorrow. At the graveyard, the nation of tomorrow lies beneath patches of sun-scorched brown.

* * *

Food and clean water are the most basic needs of life. But in Tanzania, many children live without enough of either. The infant mortality rate is almost 13 times greater than that of the United States and one of every eight children dies by age 5.

Children now also have to contend with AIDS. Without proper treatment, HIV can be transmitted to babies at birth or through breast-feeding, sometimes by mothers who must choose between giving their babies tainted breast milk or allowing them to starve. Roughly 110,000 children are living with HIV and AIDS in Tanzania. Those who escape the deadly virus often are left orphaned by it.

Retired husband-and-wife doctors Bill and Peg Hoffman of Bethlehem have worked to help children in Tanzania for more than seven years. They returned for their semiannual visit in the summer of 2006 with a new group of Moravian Church missionaries, among them Mia Mengel of Upper Nazareth Township.

The goal was to spark a missionary renaissance in a country where a majority of the world's Moravians now live. For Mia, a financial expert and 42-year-old mother of two, the journey to Tanzania fulfilled a lifelong dream of missionary work. For the Hoffmans, it was the first of what they hoped would be many trips by new Moravian missionaries like Mia who will take up their fight to save the children.

Children sent Mia to her highest highs and lowest lows on the mission. Visiting the pediatric ward at the Moravian-founded Sikonge District Hospital unnerved her, just as it had Dr. Peg Hoffman, known in this part of the country as Mama Peg.

In the pediatric ward, where Mama Peg worked as a doctor years earlier, most children suffer from malaria, a disease eradicated in the United States more than a half century ago.

Seven years later, she is a seasoned veteran at the hospital, which treats as many as 130 patients a day. She no longer practices medicine. Instead, Mama Peg and her husband write grants, bringing money and medical supplies to the hospital, outlying clinics and dispensaries.

In the summer of 2006, Mia saw the pediatric ward through a different set of eyes, those of a mother with a sick child back home. She saw children tethered to intravenous bags hanging from a rope that ran from end to end of the pediatric ward. Mothers lay two to a bed shooing flies from their sleeping babies. The sight sent Mia in retreat outside.

Her youngest son was beset by chronic digestive problems almost since the day he was born. At home in the Lehigh Valley, Mia has a team of pediatricians and specialists on speed dial who can be summoned almost immediately, as they had been when her son was hospitalized for emergency surgery at Easton Hospital in Wilson. The contrast with what she saw in the Sikonge pediatric ward left her with a sense of gratitude tinged with guilt.

Her son had the best medical care in a nation of abundance. While children in Tanzania starved, he had access to every type of food, yet he failed to thrive as a baby. Though he is healthier today, at age 8, he still picks at his food, eating as much as a toddler. With only basic care, Mia wondered what chance a child like her son would have in Tanzania.

Cherished dream, stark reality

''Mia Mia Tanzania,'' as she became known to the other missionaries, walked everywhere in the village with children clinging to each finger. Mia wished she had more hands.

One day a dozen children followed her to the guest house where she stayed. She ducked inside for a few minutes and, when she came out, rewarded those who waited with a shower of bubbles. At first the children shied away from the shiny circles that floated through the air only to burst, leaving dark spots in the red earth.

''Bubbles,'' said Mia.