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My family spent 2.5 years in a remote village up the Sepik River about 240 miles from the end of the road coming out from Wewak. Our work there consisted of education and development with the intent of establishing a thriving church. Although we were not trained nurses we did have some training for bush medicine and had many opportunities to help the people.
 One child that became very special to us was Leslie, the adopted son of our close friend and village leader, Akan and his wife Nenyaki.
Leslie had been brought to Akan and his wife shortly after birth and as Nenyaki was not nursing at the time, she attempted to feed him with some formula that Akan had purchased on one of his last trips to town. Since Akan was a business man dealing with crocodile skins he had enough money for such luxuries but unfortunately Nenyaki could not read the instructions on the can and her method of mixing the formula was simply to put enough in the water to make it white.
Also, Nenyaki was not too careful with where the bottle was left. It was often laying around on the floor of the cooking area where the dogs and children played. And she did not know to boil the water and the bottle to make sure it was sterile.
Needless to say it was not long before little Leslie was a very sick little boy. By the time my wife Elana realized what was happening Leslie had diarrhea and was severely dehydrated. On top of all this it appeared as if he had malaria as well. Poor Leslie was so listless he did not respond in any way to a bottle. There appeared to be no suckling response left in his poor little frame.
Elana immediately realized that we were looking at a child that was not going to make it though the night without a dedicated effort and perhaps come miraculous intervention. 
Thankfully Akan and Nenyaki were able to be persuaded to let us have Leslie and begin to try to dehydrate him by force feeding with an eyedropper. The first night we could see that Akan and Nenyaki were quite agitated and so we invited them to sleep on mats on our living room floor. They gratefully accepted. Throughout the night Elana and Tawnie, a student staying with us, took shifts and tried to get the life saving liquid down little Leslie's throat. By morning things didn't look much different but Leslie was still alive!
Elana spent the morning teaching Nenyaki how to sterilize the water and the bottle and mix the formula and she let her take a few of the day shifts. The second night Akan and Nenyaki were much more comfortable leaving Leslie with us and they slept in their own home which was quite near ours. Somewhere during the night it became apparent that Leslie was getting stronger. He seemed to sleep much more peacefully and Elana got a bit of sleep right beside him.
 By the morning after the second night we felt that Leslie was definitely out of danger and beginning to get much stronger. We turned him back over to his mother and rejoiced that God had allowed us to have a hand in saving this precious life. Leslie ended up growing to be one of the fattest little boys in the village. As you can see from some of these pictures, the diapers might have been a bit big but it didn't take him long to grow into them.
He is now a happy member of Akan's family and will have better care due to the fact that Nenyaki decided to listen and learn a better way. Below is a picture of their fine family all dressed up for church. 
There are so many cases like this where the families have no hope because they do not have anyone to turn to. There are literally hundreds of villages like this that do not have any services and that do not have airstrips or even the river to make travel possible. So much of the time all we could do was cry when we would get requests for help from the remote interior villages. Sometimes a delegation of villagers would travel for days to come to our home and ask for us to send someone to help their village.
We are praying that soon Mission Support Network will be able to serve these villages that are spread all over this forgotten land.
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