Our time in El Carmen del Itenez started well for me because I was greeted by a man grateful for a surgery we had done on him this past year. It got even better later. A volunteer physician from the US was seeing patients beside me and I noticed a man carrying his daughter to her. His daughter is around six-years old and had meningitis as a baby. She did not receive timely medical care and has suffered the consequences in the form of severe spastic paralysis. The volunteer doctor was regretfully explaining to him that we did not have the anti-seizure medication they needed when some of us remembered—we had a child’s wheelchair on board! It’s a long story how it got there, but suffice it to say it was a Divine intervention. When we told the father we had a wheelchair for his daughter his expression changed. He said, “You are not going to believe this, but this morning at breakfast my wife told me she’d had a dream in which a boat came and gave our daughter a wheelchair. When your boat pulled in, she wondered if this was our wheelchair arriving.” He then explained that he and his wife have not been walking with God. Why would God give a woman in El Carmen a dream like that? I think He wanted her to know that He was personally sending this wheelchair to them.
This was not a donation from the doctors or the boat. This was a personal gift from God Almighty to a little six-year old in El Carmen del Itenez, totally off the beaten track and unknown to all but Him.