Medical Missions and digging trenches

Today I am exhausted. I know Laurens is too by the look on his face. But we are happy.....very happy. We have just finished day 4 of work with one of the biggest medical and construction teams of the year. It is the first of 2 back to back Canadian Teams. Today was a "day off" and anyone in ministry that works with teams knows how that goes. I asked Laurens, "are you going to take a break?" He said, "I did" and with a gleam in his eye he told me how he dug a trench with the new backhoe. One man's work is another man's treasure I guess!

Yesterday we held our first large mobile medical clinic in Haiti. It went amazing! At Mission of Hope our goal is to raise up strong Christian Haitians and to teach them how

to run programs for their people. At our hospital outpatient, clinic we are so proud that it is fully Haitian run now.  I am still working behind the scenes to facilitate that, but what this has allowed us to do is branch out into mobile clinics with our teams to bring the healing love of Jesus into other needy areas. 

As always we saw cases that broke our hearts. The dental team shown here at one point had a 4 year old boy who had all of his teeth rotted through from sugar. His mother would feed him

sugar water every night to stop his hunger pains. They had no idea that his teeth had "died" and that it was from the sugar. He will need all his teeth pulled or his adult teeth will be damaged too. For our dental assistants, knowing how easy it is to prevent this, it was very difficult for them to keep the tears from flowing for this precious boy.

This little child is the 5th child I have seen in 

4 months with brain damage. This child will never walk, may not talk and will have mental and physical disability for the rest of her life. This is a picture of myself and a Canadian MD examining her. I think the heartbreaking thing for me is that each time I encounter a child like 

this, I need to break this news to the mother. Every time, the mother has no idea that her child has something wrong with her brain, and every time I am asked, "So it can't be fixed?" or "can't you fix it?". That is when we pray.....it is all I can do. I am thankful for the donations of a few special needs wheelchairs that these children will need. 

As we wrapped up from our first mobile clinic I said a special prayer of thanks.

A prayer of thanks for our safety, a prayer of thanks for how our Canadian team integrated with the Haitian staff we took along, a prayer of thanks for the lives that were touched, a prayer

of thanks for the connections made with the pastor of the school we worked out of, a prayer of thanks for our team and a prayer of thanks for this wonderful ministry.

Tonight I go to bed exhausted but happy to be starting all over again tomorrow on a new adventure.

Cheryl