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 Sunday, April 25 is World Malaria Day. And I hope you’ll check out what ONE is doing to inspire action and find out how you can include your faith community here.
Malaria has touched my family in a dramatic way. It almost killed my son Vasco. When I first met Vasco three years ago, he had a hole in his heart. Vasco was an AIDS orphan in Malawi then. Skinny. Knobby knees. Huge eyes. Beautiful, regal features. After his mother, father and gogo (grandmother) died, he lived on the streets for a few years, often sleeping in the open without a bed or netting to keep away the mosquitoes.
As we were visiting with him and a few members of his extended family, Vasco came and sat on my lap. He leaned his bony, narrow back into my chest and immediately I knew something was not right. His heart was beating frighteningly hard, so violently that his heartbeat was actually moving my body. We soon learned that he had a large ventricular septal defect – a hole the size of a quarter in his heart. We sought treatment for him in Malawi, but there was none to be had.
Nearly two years later, after a roller-coaster ride of red tape and the stunning generosity of hundreds of Chicago Sun-Times readers who heard Vasco’s story, he came to Chicago on April 29, 2009 for life-saving heart surgery. But two weeks to the day after he arrived in Chicago, Vasco spiked a high fever and was diagnosed with a raging case of malaria. He had had it once before, a few weeks after we met him in Malawi. He was hospitalized there and almost died. In Chicago, where he had immediate care from doctors, we learned that malaria has a two-week incubation period. Had he pitched the fever in Malawi, he would not have been allowed to travel, and, more than likely, he would have died.
With access to world-class medical care at Hope Children’s Hospital outside Chicago, Vasco survived malaria and host of other ailments — including a water-borne parasite that had lodged in his bladder. On June 10, 2009, Vasco underwent successful open-heart surgery to make his heat whole again. Not long after, Vasco became part of our family when my husband Maury and I began the long process of adopting him. Today, Vasco is happy and healthy and loved. He’s grown almost six inches and put on about 25 pounds. He is able to play soccer for the first time in his life and even scored his first goal a few weeks ago. Vasco is our healthy, normal (extraordinary) boy. He has healed our hearts with his, too, and he has a family for the rest of his life.
(Learn more about Vasco’s journey here)
ONE’s co-founder Bono once told me: “We can’t do everything. But what we can do, we must do.”
For this World Malaria Day, do what you can. Check out the ONE Sabbath World Malaria Day materials, watch a great new video from United Against Malaria, and then sign-up to bring ONE to your house of worship.
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