Born and raised in Georgia, and now living in Helena and attending Covenant United Methodist Church, Jim said just before his sixth birthday, he learned he was malaria free after contracting the disease when he was 3 years old.
“I thought that was my birthday present,” he said.
But Jim is keenly aware of the fact that had he been a little boy living in Africa, he would have been dead. Statistics from global health partners show that 1 in 5 children in Africa die from malaria before the age of 5.
“It’s just horrible to think about that,” he said.
This is why Jim is more than thrilled to know the United Methodist Church is at work in Africa through Imagine No Malaria trying to put an end to preventable deaths from malaria through a comprehensive approach that includes education, prevention, treatment and communication efforts.
“I used to lie in bed and pray for a cure,” Jim said.
He doesn’t remember how he contracted malaria as a 3-year-old boy growing up in southern Georgia in 1933, but he does remember how it felt.
For three years, his muscles and bones ached constantly as doctors tried to rid the malaria parasite from his body with different medicines. Any time he’d get a cold or a fever, the symptoms were magnified because of the malaria.
Three times a week, he had to go to the doctor in his small town close to the Georgia-Florida border to have his blood drawn. He recalls getting to the doctor’s office and seeing the long set of stairs and praying, “Dear Lord” before having his finger “lanced” to take a blood sample to put under a microscope to see if the treatment was working.
Jim said he doesn’t want other little children to have to go through the pain he did, knowing that malaria is a disease that is preventable, treatable and beatable. He likes the idea that for just $10 a life can be saved.
“I feel so sorry for these poor little kids,” he said. “They’re dying.”
A $10 donation to the Yellowstone Conference Imagine No Malaria campaign can purchase either a bed net for two people to sleep under or it can provide for a diagnosis and medicinal kit for a person in Africa who might be suffering from malaria. The donation will also train health care workers on how to diagnose and treat malaria in addition and improve communication efforts related to such trainings.
Jim believes all children deserve the chance to celebrate their sixth birthday … and every day after that.
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