Phillip Joshua is the kid that I got really close to on the trip.  H is 3 years old and was the first kid I picked up as I go to the orphanage.  At first he would play this kind of game with me and Krissy and he wouldn’t talk to us, but just give us this faint little grin.  We had one of the other orphans, once, ask him if he spoke English.  He nodded at the kid, saw us, and then acted like nothing ever happened.  But that next day, everything changed.  We had this thing going on called vacation Bible School, and everyone went outside to play a game and we were watching.  I was holding Phillip and he started to cough.  Then he started having trouble breathing.  I rushed him into the clinic and they made me go get the respiratory specialist.  We got back and she started hooking Phillip up to a respirator.  At that point, Krissy and I were freaking out and crying.  He laid down to open his lungs more and he grabbed two of my fingers, looked me straight in the eyes, and started crying with this look on his face that screamed, “Help Me!”  But all I could do was just stand there, holding his hand, and silently encouraging him; telling him that it would be o.k.  After a while of him not talking to us we though that he might possible have been mute and we were trying to get him to talk.  But there was no excuse anymore.  He got a shot and we found out pretty quickly that he had a set of lungs.  A good one at that.  He knew it too.  After that, we had to give him some medicine.  It was stuff that you mixed with water so we had to feed it to him.  I had to hold him like a baby and give him the drink through a baby cup.  After that day, we taught him how to say a couple of words in English that he didn’t know.  He learned balloon, window, door, Krissy, Sean, and a couple others.  He wouldn’t actually talk to us though.  Although looking him in the eyes when he was on the respirator was the hardest part, saying goodbye was next.  On our last night we had to tell him that we were leaving.  He understood us very well.  He gave us the bottom lip and mumbled something under his breath in Igala.  We had to take him back to his dorm.  He stood outside his dorm with this devastated look on his face…and we left.

Sean Lugar