“I love you to the moon and back,” is something I say to my daughters before they go to sleep. The new Stellar Love Charm Bangle speaks to that incredible, indescribable, and universal feeling of love that knows no bounds and reaches far beyond the stars.
In the spring of this year I traveled to Liberia in West Africa to visit rural clinics where the therapeutic ready-to-use foods we make in Rhode Island go by land and sea. In one clinic, I witnessed a mother with a sick baby on her back seeking help because her breast milk had dried up and there wasn’t enough love in the world to keep her baby alive, perhaps for one more day.
When I first saw this mother and child, my heart stopped. They both looked so tiny. To reach the clinic, the mother had walked for miles in dusty and worn-out flip flops. “How about this mother and baby?” I asked the nutrition officer, feeling a sense of urgency to speak up. “I think they need help first.”
And so the two went to the front of the line. The baby girl, nearly as weightless as a baby bird, was unwrapped from her mother’s cloth, weighed, and measured. The suspected diagnosis confirmed: severe acute malnutrition.
The mother was 19 years old. Surprice, her seven-month old baby girl, weighed only seven pounds. As Surprice sat in her mother’s lap and ate the first bites of Plumpy’Nut, the first taste of complex nourishment she’d had in her life, she changed. Her heaving chest, gasping for air and life, started to relax. Her eyes got brighter. As she looked around wide-eyed at all of the people surrounding her, we smiled back, because we knew she was one of the lucky ones. She was going to make it.
Severe acute malnutrition is devastating the lives of over 17 million young children and their families worldwide. None have a voice to say: “I need help. This can’t wait.” Plumpy’Nut, the miracle cure first invented by Nutriset in France, is in desperate demand worldwide. With relentless optimism, I have devoted my life to speaking up for this cause and these vulnerable children and putting actions behind my words.
The Stellar Love Charm Bangle means the world to malnourished children because it shines the light on their plight while it also provides them with a real-world solution. With each bangle you buy, we can make more Plumpy’Nut than ever before. This means more relief and hope for another loving mother who right now, as you read these words, is walking alone for miles in flip flops to save the life of her child.
Written by Navyn Salem, Founder and CEO of Edesia