No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. -Isaiah 65:20

At Rotifunk Hospital, you can feel two things almost palpably. There is a holy discontentment in the area— a sense that the way things are is not the way God meant things to be. One in ten babies will die, and one in every five children before the age of five. In November, the Mission of Hope team visited the hospital, with a brand-new unused operating room, possibly the best operating room in all of Sierra Leone. The hospital now has a surgeon, who is trained and qualified to do C-sections and save women’s and children’s lives. They have clean, fresh water from a well.

However, the hospital does not have the three hundred dollars a month to hire a nurse anesthetist and surgical nurse. Women who needed C-sections had to travel hours on a bumpy road to other hospitals, where they may or may not receive good treatment. There is a surgeon and an operating room and no ability to do surgery. The room sat empty, unused. Waiting.

Now there is hope. Because of the generosity of people like you, the hospital will begin offering surgeries in just a few weeks. Hope that God was going to restore the hospital not only to what it had been before but to even greater than it had been before. A place where, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, infants do not live only a few days.

Written by Reverend Christina Turner from Wrightsville United Methodist Church