Sandy Calbrin had it all. Wealth. Beauty. A successful business. Then she travels to Africa...and her life forever changes.
She'll risk her life repeatedly to save as many children as she can...but will she succeed? Or will her compassionate heart cost her dearly?
Out now from Illuminate, a Christian fiction imprint of Prism Book Group!
Blurb:
Sandra Calbrin flies to Africa after a military coups to check on the orphans she sponsors and to collect shea nuts for beauty creams in her health spa. Urged by the pastor, she agrees to vaccinate infants.
Shocked by the often dangerous practices that parents in the region engage in, she struggles to prevent them from harming their children. To prove she can care for a child, Sandy takes in an abandoned baby and names her Blessing, hoping to break the child’s curse.
Unfamiliar with obscure customs, Sandy breaks local taboos, is accused of prostitution, and of having an illegitimate child.
Blessing’s father demands money in exchange for his daughter. Selling children is illegal but returning Blessing to her father almost guarantees the infant’s death.
Military officers harass Sandy and refuse to renew her visa unless she consents to their unscrupulous ultimatums. Blessing’s relatives and the police officers pursue her with threats and immoral demands. They come after her like a pack of lions preying on a wildebeest.
When rebel soldiers take up arms and gunfire erupts in the village, Sandy and her baby Blessing are in danger. Since military officials and immigration authorities continue to terrorize her, who can help her and will she keep her Blessing?
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Excerpt:
Copyright © 2013 Celeste Charlene
Sandra Calbrin slid out of the bush taxi and rotated her neck to ease her nervousness. Her gaze wandered to the black and white sheep that peppered the pasture. Seeing fields of corn stalks swaying in the breeze, she relaxed. She grabbed the medical basket and her backpack. Squaring her shoulders, she took a few hesitant steps to the mud-brick church. Nursing in Africa appeared simpler than it had been in the States.
A small man with tribal scars came toward her. Dressed in filthy, torn pants, he carried an upside-down wooden table on his head and extended his dark, calloused hand. “Welcome to Koala. I am Pastor Paul. The measles epidemic started in the villages a hundred miles northwest of us. Many children died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My brothers live in that area and lost some of their children.”
“I hope no more little ones will pass away from the epidemic.” She fought down her fluttering stomach. “I brought enough vaccinations for all the children in this region.”
Pastor Paul raised his arms and grabbed the edges of the table. He took it off his head and turned it over as he set it down. “You can put the medicines on this. I am happy you came to help.”
She opened the basket and began setting bottles on the shaky table. Sandy raised her hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I’ll record the vaccinations on the health cards, plot the weights on the graphs, and give a malaria prophylaxis during this visit. I agreed to establish the Under Five’s Clinics to treat the ill children as well as inoculate them.”
“We do not have cards. Did you bring them?”
“Yes, they’re in my basket.” A trickle of sweat slid down her spine. “But I’m not the best person for this job. I offered to hire another nurse, who spoke the local dialect, to vaccinate the infants, but she couldn’t come.”
“You are the right one for the job.”
Sandy had to be the only one for the huge task ahead of her. She couldn’t decline. No decent person would refuse to save children’s lives. Her mouth and eyes opened wider at the groups of mothers and infants who were coming from every direction. Could she treat patients again after the incidents in the hospital in the States? Her skin tingled, and she shuddered.
A large woman with black tattoos on her cheeks walked toward them. She took a bucket of water off her head and set it on the ground. The pastor bent down, picked up a large stone, and positioned it under the shortest table leg. He stood and adjusted the table to get it level. “This is my wife. She has given me four children in our five years of marriage.”
Most likely the pastor meant it as a compliment, but Sandy’s heart ached for the barefoot wife, who must work from sunup to sundown. Reproduction had to be her primary function.
“You must be a busy woman.” Sandy put out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The wife nodded. She kept her mouth closed almost as if she couldn’t respond.
“Everyone in the village is a farmer.” Pastor Paul lifted his chin and beamed. “My wife works hard and goes with me to the fields every day. And she sings like a dove.”
The corners of Sandy’s lips twitched. She tilted her head away from the woman and toward the young men who carried wooden benches out of the church. Mothers with babies sat down. Sandy took the scale and tied it to a sturdy branch of the mango tree at eye level. A large pair of cotton pants, that could accommodate children from the size of a newborn to that of a three-year-old child, dangled from the swinging balance.
Picking up a treatment card, she squinted at the unique combination of letters. Opening and closing her mouth several times, she tried to form the words.
The pastor looked over her shoulder and shouted, “Salubatu Hemouwa.”
A mother came forward with her infant. Sandy’s gaze drifted over everyone’s soiled clothes. It looked as if the children hadn’t been bathed in weeks. She fixed her eyes on the bucket of water the pastor’s wife brought her to wash her hands between patients. Dust and maggots floated on top of it. No one could keep clean in such an environment.
“Pastor, where do people get their drinking water?”
“We get our water from the river. It’s closer to our homes than the well.”
“Do you boil your drinking water?”
“No one can waste firewood to boil water for drinking. We heat it to cook and bathe.”
What was the point of vaccinating babies if they could die from diarrhea, worms, and dysentery? She ran her fingers through her hair and flattened it behind her ears. Her chest tightened, but she’d do the best she could.
Sandy lifted the sleeping boy. As she lowered his body into the hanging pants, a disgusting odor came from him. She slipped each of his feet inside the trouser legs and leaned the infant back in the crotch of the dangling shorts. Watery stools with blood ran out of the hanging trousers. She looked at the mother. “Your baby is very sick. He needs a treatment for amebic dysentery and malarial fever. This card says he is eight months old, but he weighs only seven pounds. He is malnourished and anemic.”
The mother nodded, opened her bag, and took out coins worth about twenty-five cents. “Thank you.”
The clinic guidelines recommended patients pay a small fee. The investment of a token amount by mothers guaranteed they would give the medications. Throughout the day, Sandy weighed children and charted the kilograms on the health cards. She giggled at the laughing, cocoa-skinned babies, but they were like American ones. They wailed just as loudly when she injected the vaccines. She used the infant’s weight to calculate the number of worm tablets and chloroquine pills for malarial fever.
Toward sundown the sky darkened. There wouldn’t be enough time to weigh and inoculate all the babies. In the distance lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. Without electricity, she couldn’t examine youngsters well enough with a bush lantern. Having talked all day, her throat was scratchy. She swallowed over and over to ease the soreness, but her hands worked fast to inoculate as many children as possible. She hadn’t come to Africa to vaccinate infants, but after the project was completed, she’d have time to carry out her own mission. A heavy downpour beat the ground, and she tossed all the bottles of medications into her basket. Picking up her bags, she dashed after the pastor and his wife.
They stopped at the door and took off their shoes. She set her bags down and left her shoes next to the others. Her wet clothes made her shiver, so she crossed her arms and rubbed them. She picked up the bags and stepped inside the small home. Rain hammered on the tin roof.
The pastor moved grass-woven mats and wooden benches from one room into another chamber. “I am preparing a place for you to sleep in my house with my family.”
He carried a two-inch-thick piece of foam cushion and put it on top of a bamboo bed frame in a tiny room off the sitting room. “This will be your sleeping chamber.”
Sandy pointed. “Can you close the wooden shutters to the windows and the door to keep the mosquitoes and other insects outside?”
The pastor slammed the heavy flaps. “You will not get fresh air this way.”
“It’s fine for now. I’d like privacy to take off these wet clothes and put on dry ones.”
After Sandy changed, she stepped out of the room. The pastor’s wife carried bowls of white rice with tomato sauce and fish heads. She set them on a tiny table and handed a heaping plate to Sandy.
She ate her fill before extending her dish to the pastor. “Your wife prepared too much food for me. Could someone finish this sauce and fish head?”
The pastor took the plate. “Yes. Thank you. Feel free to go to bed when you like.”
She nodded and went into her room. As she pulled out a clean set of clothes, deafening screams halted her. Quivers ran up and down her spine. Sandy dashed into the sitting room and found the pastor. “Something’s wrong.”
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