Maggie Karner discusses Mercy Medical Teams with LCMS World Relief and Human Care Director, Matthew Harrison

Maggie is the director of Health and Life Ministries. She served as a team leader on the MMT trip to Kenya this July. Scarlet Holcombe, PharmD and LCMS WR-HR Coordinator of Special Projects, also led the team. During this trip the team served over 800 patients in Matango, Kenya and the Kibera Slums in Nairobi, Kenya.

I was not able to join this trip so I would like to put out a special thanks to our staff and our wonderful volunteers for another meaningful and effective trip!

Why We Do What We Do…

While we have a little break from the Mercy Medical Team trips, I would like to take some time to talk about the motivation behind this program. Short term missions of all sorts have increased drastically over the years, and like anything they take on different forms and achieve different purposes.

The basis and foundation for our Mercy Medical Teams is completely outlined in a short publication written by LCMS World Relief and Human Care executive director, Matthew Harrison, entitled Theology of Mercy.

You can download this document and others for free at:
http://www.lcms.org/ca/worldrelief/onlinestore/

For those who have difficulty understanding how a normally secular vocation can be utilized to serve in Christ’s name, this piece not only tells you how, but also why it is necessary. It clearly demonstrates the need for a “corporate life of mercy” which can be applied to any vocation.

In terms of the Mercy Medical Team Program, Theology of Mercy outlines the justification for the programs existence and the motivation behind our actions, which is of course, Christ’s unconditional love and mercy and his mandate to care for both body and soul of our neighbors.

This may seem clear and easy to understand; however, as I have had more experiences with short term medical missions and have become more aware of the growing number of organizations hosting short term missions, it has become clear to me that the motivation behind this kind of service is not always so cut and dry.

For example many other organizations and groups will, like us, use the word “Mercy” in association with their medical mission. As I read through their literature and their websites it often becomes evident that they are indeed speaking of their own mercy, rather than Christ’s. They view it as THEIR mercy, and the services becomes as much about making themselves feel good as it is about helping the sick and the vulnerable in society.

Most Christian organizations offering short term medical missions also make treatment conditional by having patients attend a bible class or receive evangelism literature at the end of the clinic.

Medical clinic held in Banda Aceh, Indonesia February 2009.

Evangelism is illegal in this location, where close to 99% of the population is Muslim

I will not go so far as to say that these approaches are wrong, however, I believe these groups are missing the point that is made so evident in the Theology of Mercy. We know that Christ is the only one who saves; we know His love and His mercy are unconditional, so our approach to demonstrating His love and mercy should be unconditional as well.

So why do we do what we do? Because those who have received Christ’s grace and mercy are mandated to serve in his example and demonstrate His love and mercy through our God given skills and talents. It is as simple as that. Once this becomes clear, you can reach people anywhere. Regardless of nationality or faith, people will see Christ’s love in our unconditional acts of mercy…we will let Him take it from there.

Haiti to Become a New MMT Site

This past May, I made a preliminary trip to the island nation of Haiti to lay the groundwork for the Mercy Medical Team trip scheduled for this coming August. This will be our first MMT trip to Haiti and will be as much about relationship building and assessing need as it will be about serving the sick. We will be partnering with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Haiti to offer a series of medical clinics in the remote town of Thomassique in the central plateau of Haiti near the border with the Dominican Republic.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Haiti is a relatively young church body, having been officially organized in 1995. Despite its short history, the church has expanded its attendants from less than 2000 in 1995, to around 20,000 currently. Of these approximately 11,000 are baptized according to Pastor Marky Kessa, President of the ELCH. With only 16 ordained pastors and around 100 lay pastors, the ELCH has 102 congregations, 65 schools, 3 orphanages, and a medical clinic. This is all in the context of a nation with around 9 million inhabitants living in less than 11,000 square miles. Haiti is a very poor country; in fact, it is the poorest and least developed nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Looking at these numbers, the challenges faced by the church and the pastors are many. Like many other church bodies in developing countries, the ELCH is drastically limited by a lack of resources.

Like many of young church bodies, the ELCH has congregation forming in small communities around the country with groups of 10-20 attendants growing over a few years to 60-70 attendants. These congregations generally meet in small simple shelters containing a metal sheet roof and a few pillars.

One pastor may be responsible for 10 congregations across an area of 100km. While 100km may not seem like much, the roads in Haiti are quite poor and it could take three or four hours to drive that distance. Most of these pastors do not have a reliable means of transportation, so making rounds to each of the congregations becomes next to impossible.

Another challenge to the ELCH is theological training for pastors and lay pastors. Many of the leaders and founding members of the ELCH received training from LCMS seminaries in the United States; yet, they have not had the resources to pass this knowledge on in their own seminaries. Although there are many men who are interested in becoming pastors, they do not have to means to attain it. This is in part due to the cost of the education, but primarily due to the opportunity cost of taking four years away from work and/or agricultural land.

So one can imagine the difficulties the ELCH faces as it attempts to introduce humanitarian programs and develop its capacity as a diakonic entity. If they cannot afford to build an adequate church building, how can they open a medical clinic or initiate an orphan support program? Yet they have expressed a desire to improve and build their capacity as such, in order to better meet the needs of their members.

This is not something that can be done overnight. It is something that inevitably needs to derive from their ideas, efforts, and actions.

Until then, the role of LCMS World Relief is to help the ELCH develop its capacity as a church body with humanitarian capabilities as they continue to grow. The ELCH has done

an excellent job planting churches and drawing new members through the Lutheran Confessions. They have done an excellent job caring for the souls of their members. Now we want to help them care for both body and soul. And we will attempt to begin this partnership through a Mercy Medical Team expedition.

The trip will be from August 3rd-13th and will provide free general medical care to the surrounding community of Thomassique.

Other trips coming up include: Kenya, July 2nd – 12th and Madagascar, October 21st – November 1st. (there are still limited openings for both Haiti and Madagascar)

Kenya, April 13-23
Kisumu City, and the village of Atemo

From April 13th to 23rd a team of 8 volunteers and 2 staff traveled to Western Kenya to serve targeted communities with a series of medical clinics. The team comprised of two physicians of emergency medicine, three nurses, a physical and musical therapist, and two lay people. The team had two LCMS WR-HC staff team leaders; Jacob Fiene, Manager of Medical Resources, and Scarlet Holcombe PharmD and coordinator of special projects. The team hired the help of three Kenyan nurse practitioners during each of the clinics.

In all the team held a total of 4 clinics and treated a total of 1172 patients with a record breaking 454 patients on our final day. We held two clinics in the newly opened Kisumu Lutheran Medical Center and two clinics in the soon to be revamped Atemo Medical Clinic. In the first site we served a somewhat urban population, in the second a predominantly rural population.

Each Mercy Medical Team experience is different, but this one was very special. Not only did we have the opportunity to work alongside national health workers and offer our services to the sick and vulnerable, we were able to tangibly save the lives of at least three people in very desperate situations.

During a clinic in the village of Atemo, Dr. Mana Kasongo was approached by the staff nurse of the Atemo Maternity Ward. The nurse asked Dr. Kasongo if she was capable of delivering a baby. Somewhat excited at the prospect, Dr. Kasongo hurried next door. After a quarter hour of deliberation, however, it was discovered that the young woman had been in labor for over 16 hours and was now in danger of loosing the life of her baby as well as her own life. Dr. Kasongo gently yet sternly explained the urgency of the situation. It seemed the family of the young woman had given up hope, knowing there would be no way to pay for her admittance to a hospital. After making the severity of the situation clear to the girl’s family, Dr. Kasongo and Rev. David Chuchu were able to rush the young woman to the nearby Matata Hospital in Oyugis where she received emergency surgery. Both mother and daughter are now healthy. The baby was named Mana, after Dr. Kasongo.

Before Dr. Kasongo had left for Kenya she was approached by a virtual stranger who overheard her MMT plans while in a hair salon. After a few questions the woman handed Dr. Kasongo a check written out to LCMS World Relief and Human Care saying that she felt led to donate something to this cause. The amount given in that check was precisely enough to cover the expenses of this emergency operation.

The following day Dr. Alfred Woodard saw another case in need of immediate action. A child named Eric came into his exam room along with his brother and a neighbor. Both Erik and his brother are orphans living with their grandmother, both were malnourished. Erik, however, was extremely sick. Dr. Woodard had never seen a case such as his, but he was immediately able to identify the child’s obvious edema and further diagnose him with Nephrotic Nephritic Syndrome. Dr. Woodard took immediate action to get the boy re-hydrated and to get some protein in his diet. Woodard and his wife Ella, then bought Eric’s family three hens to provide him with egg whites to help him recover, while another MMT volunteer agreed to sponsor his education.

Eric’s case was very severe. He has been transferred to a hospital in Kisumu where he is continuing his recovery.

These stories highlight the biggest difficulties faced by short term medical volunteers traveling to developing nations. We can all get passed the unfamiliar foods, the bumpy roads, and the difference in language. It is the complete divergence in the circumstances of life that really separates volunteers from those who they seek to serve during these trips. In the United States when there is a real medical emergency we do what needs to be done immediately. If someone is about to die but cannot pay, this person ends up getting treatment and the cost gets absorbed somewhere.

In places like the Kenyan countryside people are much more inclined to accept their perceived fate. For many people the cost of simply getting transport to a sanitary health facility is outside of their reach. This, combined with the devastating effects of HIV and other diseases, has shaped the reality of life and death for these people. Understanding the limitations they face can be difficult for volunteers to understand. It may not be possible for someone to receive follow up care, or to be referred, or pay for tests, or even brush their teeth twice a day. It becomes difficult to balance what is possible with what is needed according to our own standards.

I’ll use the pregnant woman and here family as an example. To outside medical professionals it was clear that the girl and her child were going to die without surgery. To the family it was clear that the girl and her child might die if the girl didn’t give birth soon. It may have appeared as though the family of the pregnant girl was somewhat apathetic towards the severity of her situation. They never pleaded with us to take their daughter in. They were not exactly frantic. When told that their daughter needed to go to the hospital the just looked at each other as if to say, “yeah, but how?” It was not until the girl had been operated on and she and her child were both living that the families’ tears began to flow and their love for their child and gratitude towards us was expressed, and believe me they were very grateful.

While experiences such as these present great challenge to the group and often lead to frustration, they inevitably bring the group together as it becomes clear that this is no longer just a process and giving people ibuprofen and lollypops, we are actually here to save lives.

As we sat together at the Serena Hotel overlooking the Masai Mara game preserve (our little end of trip R&R treat), the group openly shared their impressions. Although the MMT program exists to serve the sick and help our partner churches abroad build their capacity, it was clear that we were all taking something home with us; a kind of education that you cannot get from textbooks or medical schools. These trips offer a new perspective on life and health in the world, and help to restore the empathy that first drives individuals to seek out a medical career.