Kihingi Children
Dear All,
I felt sure you’d want to pray into this.
On Wednesday a tragedy occurred in Kihingi, Bushubi an hour from our Ngara Office.
This is an area that we have been distributing grain in this year due to drought and famine – the people of Bushubi have already suffered greatly.
A children found a grenade in the Bush and brought it into school to play with, without realising what it was.. It exploded as the children were going into class, killing 8 children outright and injuring 43 children.
The children were in Standard 1-2 classes, so 6-8 years old.
Due to the trouble with Burundian bandits in Bushubi, bordering Burundi, the army had been called in repeatedly to discover and destroy the bandit encampments – I would imagine that this piece of ordinance came from one of these missions.
At the moment our Murgwanza staff are giving blood and I have allocated money that I had intended (but unspecified) for our university students – for some funds for them to buy food!! – to buy bandages – the hospital didn’t even have enough bed linen for all these casualties!
In the week ahead I will have a report on what injuries have been sustained, but I would imagine serious limb injuries, burns from the blast, eye injuries and barotrauma to ears.
We are just about starting to make a push to raise about £60,000 for January for Daftari to enable our 6000 secondary schoolers to remain in school.
Having said that – what else can we do? These dear little children have no hope of immediate or medium-term support except for Tumaini, and we are honoured to be the hands and feet of Jesus going out to them and attending to their needs – so I must remember that and get on with it and expect enough help for the daftari to come in in due course. Jehovah Jireh!
Please pray and encourage our church families to pray for the grieving Mums and Dads, the seriously injured children and those traumatised in various ways and for the doctors and nurses who must feel overwhelmed.
The photos below are from Rulenge, the local Catholic Mission Hospital, operating 2 at a time on the children, probably without an anaesthetist!! Diazepam, Ketamine or a lignocaine spinal injection is often all they have.
God bless them,
Susan xx
The photos below are – the army at the blast-site at the school, a line of children to be checked over – these are the class-mates of the dead and injured children, a child being attended to, operating 2 at a time in the OR, a child lying comatose. These photos were taken on Friday by Alex Nyamkara, who went straight to Bushubi to assess the situation and offer help on Thursday.
