Our day started off with turning on to the road where the orphanage was located, and we saw a half-naked body lying on the side of the road. We weren’t sure if she was dead or not, then saw her move and realized she was alive. Her one eye was swollen shut, and there were cuts on her face that were oozing. We grabbed an interpreter from the orphanage and asked a number of questions, but she wasn’t answering the questions and seemed confused. She was filthy, wearing nothing but a dirty tank top that had blood on it, which barely covered her emaciated body. We learned from some locals that around 2:00 a.m., she was beaten and raped and left for dead on the street. Everyone seemed to hear what happened, so we wondered why, at 10:00 a.m., not one person had stopped to help this woman?
We picked her up and walked her over to the clinic at the orphanage to examine her. Then we hooked her up to an I.V. and started examining her, wiped her body down (which was covered in dust and dirt), cleaned her face wound and applied steristrips to close her wound shut. We found some of the kids clothes that fit her, fed her a protein bar and put her on the dental chair and let her just rest there all day while she took in 3 bags of fluid. At the end of the day, we sent one of the interpreters to walk her home with some bottled oral rehydration solution and some food and told her to come back to the clinic again tomorrow.
