Dear Friends,

Putali’s Super Porridge

I’d like to tell you about a little girl called Putali. (Her name means "butterfly", and you pronounce it POO-tuh-lee.) She lives in a village called Bhattedara (Buh-tay-dah-rah) in Nepal, where all the people are farmers (the kind that plow their fields with oxen). Her mother died when she was born. Because Putali is a girl, and since her father already had lots of children, he gave her to her grandmother to raise. It’s a sad thing that in some countries, and Nepal is one of them, people think boys are more special than girls.

Well, this little girl baby didn’t get enough to eat. She didn’t get her mother’s milk, of course. There aren’t any grocery stores with baby food and formula in Nepali villages. Her grandmother fed her cow’s milk (whenever their skinny cow had any milk to give) and corn mush, which is what poor Nepali villagers all eat. But by the time Putali was two years old she was thin, weak and couldn’t even crawl, much less walk. Her grandmother didn’t know what to do.

Fortunately for both of them, our mission has a health post near Putali’s village. A "health post" is a little hospital—I mean really little. Our health post has four rooms and six workers. None of them are doctors, but they know a whole lot about the problems people have around there. The workers have learned how to help people who are sick and how to help them to keep from getting sick in the first place. That’s where I come in. I help these Nepali workers practice fun ways to teach people about keeping safe and healthy, and then they do the teaching. (We don’t tell people to join a health club or aerobics class, because there aren’t any of those here.) We talk about easy things they can do that don’t cost a lot of money but that can tackle things like diarrhea, coughs and colds, skinny babies, and so on. Now, back to Putali… Well, one day her grandmother took her to the health post and asked the workers there to help her. They weighed Putali in a special scale and saw that she was way too light for her age. They said she was "malnourished," which means she hadn’t had enough food and the right kind of food to grow. They told the grandmother that she and Putali would have to stay at the health post for a few days and learn how to make "super porridge." What in the world is that? Well, it’s a very healthy porridge made up of corn, wheat and soybeans all ground up and cooked. (It tastes a little bit like oatmeal with peanut butter mixed in!) Those grains and beans are foods that even the poorest Nepali family can get. ("Super porridge" was invented by a missionary named Miriam Krantz, a nutritionist.) I always encourage mothers to feed their young children "super porridge" because after breast milk it’s the best thing for them—whether they are sick or not.

The health workers taught Putali’s grandmother how to measure out the grains and beans, how to roast them, how to grind them up on a grinding stone, and then how to mix the flour with water and cook up the porridge on the wood stove. They taught her how to feed Putali a little bit at a time until she got used to it. Well, it didn’t take more than a day and Putali was gobbling that stuff down! After a few days they added some mashed up spinach (that’s for Vitamin A) and she loved that too. They put a little oil in it to fatten her up. When I left the health post at the end of the week, Putali and her grandmother were both very happy. The little girl had gained some weight, and she smiled a lot. That was a year ago. I heard that Putali is three now, and she’s walking around and chatting away. The super porridge (and a little love) saved her life. It’s true, y’know. When you’re really malnourished you can get other diseases easily. Lots of children die because they’re too weak to fight off those diseases. In Nepal too many children die for reasons that could be stopped. So we are working to teach people like Putali’s grandmother how simple things like super porridge can save lives. Don’t you think it’s great that the grandmother was so proud of what she had learned that she went around and taught all the ladies in her village how to make the porridge?! Now that’s a happy ending, isn’t it?

I hope you liked the story. Please pray for kids in Nepal like Putali, who don’t have the chances that you do. Remember, each of us is one of God’s children and He loves us all the same. Please pray for us and for the Nepali workers who are spreading God’s love through the work we do.

God bless you!

Ellen "Jyoti" Collins

Email: collins@umn.mos.np

The 2000 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146