01 Dec Record Numbers of People Helped by Blessings

(Taken from Blessings International’s December 2015 newsletter.)

Julia (not her real name) was born with a cleft palate. This condition makes it difficult to eat or speak. But the worst thing is the way other people treat her–as though she is a monster. The condition and the way others treat Julia often make her mother cry.

Julia’s life changed completely when a surgical team from Children of the Americas arrived in Guatemala earlier this year. The team performed surgery to repair the cleft and enable Julia to lead a normal life. Now all her mother can do is smile.

Children of the Americas is just one of the nearly 3,000 teams that orders medicines through Blessings International every year. Over the last year (Blessings’ fiscal year 2015, which runs between September 1, 2014 and August 31, 2015), Blessings International shipped medicines with a human treatment value (HTV) of 100,570,687. That number includes both individual daily doses of medicine (called a daily treatment) and a full course of medicine (called a curative treatment). The overall HTV number for 2015 includes more than 13 million additional treatments and represents a 15% increase compared with the previous year! The significant increase means that Blessings shipped more medicines that treated many more people!