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"The
Bottoms" are home to so many children with heartbreaking,
yet inspiring, stories.
 Four-year-old
Angel Ortiz is one of them. He's always wearing a smile on his round
face, always in the mood to play. But his past is enough to make
you cry.
Mary and her team found Angel
in  September 2002, his tiny body shriveled up from a lack of food.
He was lying in a hammock, chewing on the skin of a lizard. It was
the worst thing Mary had seen yet.
We
took him to the doctor and the doctor took one look at him and shook
his head, like there's no hope. But I wouldn't listen.
 With
lots of prayer and fundraising, Mary's team fed Angel six meals a day
of chicken and fish. He began plumping up. Today, Angel looks like a little
bowling ball, and you're likely to spot him in the daycare
center at lunchtime helping feed the other children. A
great blessing. The Lord was with us all the way.
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Eight-year-old
Carla Hurd is another miracle child.
Mary and Fred found her when
she was a toddler, so weak and malnourished that she couldn't even
crawl. When they gave her a banana to eat, she yanked it from their
hands and devoured it skin and all.
Carla
is now a bilingual eight-year-old girl. She lives with Mary
and attends private school. Like Angel, it seems she's always smiling
and always ready to play around.
 Seven-year-old
Tono Pineda was another child who went to bed every night with an
empty stomach.
Mary found Tono
when he was two. He spent each day home alone with his 5-year-old
sister and a baby. Their parents spent each day looking for work or scrounging for food in the city dump. The day Mary
found the three children, she carried them straight down to her
daycare.
And
all the while he was in the day care, when he would eat, he'd be on the floor picking the rice or the food up off
the floor that the other children had dropped," Mary says. "He never wasted a
grain of rice or anything.
Today, Tono is seven years old and is one of eight children
living in a dark, filthy shanty. The youngest is three-month-old
Gisella, who we found alone on a bed as flies crawled on her mouth
and on the nipple of her bottle. But now, at least, Tono and his siblings
have a hot lunch guaranteed every day at our kitchen.
 The
story of 13-year-old Digna Flores is another heart-gripping tale.
Digna lives in a home constructed of
creek mud and sticks. It sits along a dusty road  strewn with garbage. Her
frail legs are nothing but flesh and bone.
No
matter what we do, she can't gain weight," Mary says.
The
problem, according to doctors, is that Digna is anemic. Worse yet,
Mary says Digna's mother has been exploiting the girl's infirmity
to earn money.
"They sit up on a corner and hold their hand out
and people
give them money," she says. "And that's how they get their money for their
families. Digna had been improving -- until the hospital
released her to her family.
Now
she's worse off than she was when she went to the hospital because
they won't exercise her, they won't walk her, they won't, you know,
do like the doctor said.
In
June
2005 a team from Pure Heart Christian Fellowships in Phoenix,
Arizona visited Mary. Digna's story moved their hearts.
The team left money to pay for a caretaker for Digna.
Now Digna spends her days with this caretaker and her
nights with her family. She is getting the meals and exercise
she needs.
The
hope is that within a few months, God willing and God blessing
her, that she will be able to walk again." Don Colburn
from the Pure Heart Team.
Digna
still needs support for her medical bills and ongoing treatments.
We will keep you updated.
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