Emani, God With Us

This is Emani, a beautiful 13 yr old girl that was resettled at Danita's Children's Home from PAP. She is in a lower body cast for a broken left leg. It covers her whole leg and then wraps up around her waist, cutting into her ribs, but with an opening down below so she can still use the bathroom. She was pretty much relegated to bed rest and turned her new bunk into her new home. She ate in bed, she went to the bathroom in bed-pans, and spent the hours coloring every square inch of coloring books we gave her.
Emani did not come from the collapsed orphanage that Danita resettled at her facilities. She was a new orphan, referred to Danita by a hospital & the Red Cross. So she didn't know any of the kids old or new when she arrived. I think she struggled with loneliness & boredom.

Add to that, when she had to "go", she would call out for someone nearby to help her... but if no one was around, she'd have to wet (or worse) her own bed and lie there till someone checked on her. Humiliating & hard.

When Emani arrived, scribbled all over her body cast was the diagnosis from the doctors in PAP... what had happened to her, how they treated it, what to do for her now, and when to take her cast off. Plus a bunch of nurses and doctors signing her cast and writing "God loves you! We love you!"
I watched this girl improve a lot while we were at the orphanage. She was seriously quiet when we arrived and wasn't interacting much with the other kids. But after 7 days, she was much more chatty, smiled a lot more, and was starting to make some new friends. We used a portable dentist chair to carry her outside the church one day to soak up fresh air. Missy & some from our team came up with a plan to encourage the other girls at the orphanage to bond with her, so they brought out beads for jewelry making... but Emani was in charge of giving the beads to the girls when they needed them in the creative process. She blossomed in these precious hours of girl-time.
I googled her name to see if it meant anything in her language. Turns out it is derived from the word Emmanuel, God with us. So true this is for her life. She lost her family, but she is not abandoned. She is lonely, but she is not alone. She is broken, but there is a Healer in her midst. Pray for Emani-- that God heals her body and saves her soul. He is in her name, pray He is in her life!