The heart melting miracle, Hortense is here!

In East DRC, your gift has helped 4700 children survive and recover from malnutrition.

4700 children's lives that's huge!

Since 2020, the Binza Health Zone has been helping deliver miraculous stories of transformation never. Every story is amazing, but then some just get you in all the feels, enter... four-year-old, Hortense.

Press play for heart melting :)

When you choose to give your money to an organisation, you realllllly hope it will make the difference you believe it can.

The Binza Health district is making that kind of difference.

It is a remarkable initiative with a holistic approach, focussed on helping children survive malnutrition but also including the whole community in addressing and overcoming the root causes. Your gift directly helps children in need but it is also helps support the community with activities such as:

• Access to professional health care & supplies
• Community awareness and volunteer training
• Access to livelihood training to increase household incomes
• Establishing and supporting agriculture co-ops, supplying tools, seeds & business training for selling
• Building of large community food storage warehouses
• Supplying and supporting livestock breeding programmes

Hortense's story is not uncommon. Hunger, malnutrition and neglect are realities faced by millions of children living in fragile contexts and conflict zones.

Hortense was abandoned by her mother at the age of two. Since then, she has lived with her grandmother. They were forced to flee the growing M23 conflict in Masisi territory and arrived in Binza.

Abandonment, war and displacement exacerbated Hortense's malnutrition and it became severe, diagnosed as, SAM — Severe Acute Malnutrition.

When she arrived in Binza with her grandmother, Hortense no longer had access to regular food and her grandmother had to beg for food in order to find her something to eat. It was then that she was spotted by Bénédicte, a World Vision nutritionist.

Bénédicte is a super woman, so many children in Binza are alive because of Bénédicte.

During a home visit to a child Bénédicte spotted Hortense, and immediately referred her the general hospital in Nyamilima, a partner of the Childhood Rescue Programme. Here she received appropriate emergency care in the intensive nutritional treatment unit, before being transferred to the outpatient nutritional treatment unit at the BURAMBA health centre, also supported by World Vision.

Since its launch in 2020, the Childhood Rescue programme has treated and cured 4,700 children of malnutrition.

Each year, the families of the surviving children join the care groups, through which the women receive advice on how to improve their children's diet, and unite around agricultural and livestock projects under the guidance of World Vision.

In Binza and East DRC, despite all of the fragility of life and war, your gift is helping children like Hortense survive, recover and build a future.