The Call to Serve

The Call to Serve - A brief testimony by Ellen Miller, RN

GHANA MISSION - 2009

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST MISSION TO GHANA LIKE?

The poverty was heart wrenching. When we were driving through the streets the poverty was so overwhelming that none of us could lift our cameras to take pictures of it. People were lined up from 2 in the morning for medical care. There was such a vast number of patients coming to the clinic that the town assembly woman and one of our missionaries got to the site early everyday to organize the people in line. The clinic opened from 8-5 daily. People were afraid that they would not get to see the doctor and that the medicine would run out. Some diagnoses were worms, parasites, malaria, TB, skin infections, asthma and musculoskeletal pain.

HOW MANY MISSIONS HAS THERE BEEN TO THIS LOCATION?

This was my first mission to Ghana but the second mission for HHMM.

HOW MANY PATIENTS WERE SERVED ON THIS MISSION?

We saw 2000 people on this second mission. We also distributed 350 eye glasses to the people there. We collected supplies all year long before going. The mission was held in an old TB Sanatarium that had been shut down for a year. The TB meds were still in boxes with the patients names on them in an old part of the Sanatarium.

WHAT ARE THE MOST URGENT NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS REGION?

The people in this area need specific education on TB and malaria precautions.  We saw a lot of ring worm that we treated.  Education on hygiene was also provided..Many woman had severe musculoskeletal pain from carrying heavy loads on their backs and heads that we were able to alleviate with analgesics.  We also taught proper body mechanics.  The women in the village were taught about NFP and Fr. Jeffrey provided spiritual guidance.

SUCCESS STORY

We were able to help the residents with a difficult case of an infant with cerebral malaria. This helped save the baby’s life.

HOW HAS THE MISSION HELPED SOME OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS REGION TO OBTAIN SELF SUSTAINABILITY?

Educating the people on how to better treat TB and malaria and maintain proper hygene will help them be healthier.  Teaching NFP will also help the families to be stronger.

PLEASE ADD ANYTHING ELSE TO HELP PROMOTE THIS MISSION

One of the Ghanian nurses, after working with HHMM missionaries, was inspired to become Catholic from witnessing the support and care  that we were sharing with these people.

Rosemary’s Miracle: A Story of Generosity and Opportunity

In November of 2008, Rosemary Hendricks from Texas dedicated her time and talent to serve as a volunteer nurse on our annual HELPING HANDS Medical Mission in Sonsonate, El Salvador. While there, she met a villager named Rosa Maria Cárdenas (translated as Rose Mary).

Rosa Maria had eight children and had just lost her husband tragically, a few weeks earlier. A man from the village allowed Rosa and her children to live in a small room at his home in exchange for her work as a maid. The family had no source of income when Rosemary Hendricks met them during her time in Sonsonate.

After the life-changing experience of the medical mission, Rosemary Hendricks returned home to Texas, thinking daily about the plight of Rosa and her children. Rosemary approached the HHMM team with a suggestion: she wanted to give Rosa a stipend of money to begin her own small business. Rosemary worked in the States with a team of experts to determine how best to help the business and Rosa Maria worked in El Salvador with another team of local businessmen and a group of Catholic World Mission’s Full-Time Evangelizers (ETCs), to assess her business prospects.

In the summer of 2009, Rosa Maria and her children took delivery of the supplies needed to begin a small restaurant. There the family would make a world-famous Salvadorian dish called “Pupusas,” which are corn tortillas filled with cheese, meat and beans. They would also sell drinks and desserts. Rosa’s children help in the small restaurant when they can, and now they have the income needed to attend school.

Rosa Maria’s restaurant, affectionately called “Pupuseria Rosemary’s Miracle” in honor of their family benefactor, has become the greatest gift that Rosemary Hendricks could have ever given. Her monetary donation has provided the ongoing opportunity for a family to sustain itself in one of the poorest areas of El Salvador.

A Chaplain’s View of a Mission in Africa

July 28, 2009. Asafo, Ghana (Africa). The second annual HELPING HANDS medical mission to Ghana brought a team of 15 doctors, nurses, and volunteers from the United States to the town of Sefwi-Asafo this past April 23 to May 3.

Fr Jeffery Jambon, LC, accompanied the group for the second year in a row as the chaplain, with the mission of providing spiritual care to the people and to the missionaries.

Fr Jeffery Jambon recounts a chaplain’s experience of ministering to souls in a land marked by special challenges, contrasts, and surprises.

read more at Ragnum Christi

Perspectives on medicine, faith, and the link between them

MARK KNABEL In Cotija, Mexico, the UI alumnus has discovered new perspectives on medicine, faith, and the link between them.

A chance meeting introduced Mark Knabel to the work that would change his life. It was the year 2000, and Knabel had taken his family to Rome for the Great Jubilee, a Catholic celebration of faith and forgiveness. There he met a Lupita Assad, a nurse organizing medical mission trips to poor communities around the world.

“I happened to run into her among three million people,” recalls Knabel, a Sheboygan, Wis., dermatologist and 1979 University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine graduate. “I have to think there was some divine intervention involved.”

That sense of purpose has driven Knabel’s subsequent work with Helping Hands Medical Missions in Cotija, Mexico, a community of about 20,000 where volunteers have spent nearly a decade building a clinic, recruiting doctors, providing free health care, and reinvigorating both their professional calling and their personal faith.

“It’s almost like I actually have a practice down there—whenever I’m in Cotija, I see people I’ve treated over the past seven years,” Knabel says. He’s currently preparing for his 10th mission trip in late May.

Knabel wants young people to share in the experience. In 2005, he and his wife created the Helping Hands Medical Missions Scholarship through the Mark and Mary Knabel Charitable Trust to send UI medical students and undergraduates from Loras College in Dubuque on weeklong trips to Cotija.

One of those students is Karina Silva, a second-year medical student who joined the mission in 2007 and spent an additional month working with local physicians. The trip held special importance for her, since Cotija is her hometown.

“When I was growing up there, a visiting mission group from Texas helped get me interested in medicine,” says Silva, who moved with her family to California at age 15. “Getting to go back as a medical student was amazing and fulfilling.”

A Cotija mission entails a packed schedule of clinic days in town, trips to remote neighboring villages, and evening continuing education sessions that feature lively discussion of Catholic perspectives on bioethics. The visiting volunteers work alongside local doctors, sometimes sharing new procedures or research findings.

For Silva, perhaps the most profound moment of the trip was treating her own grandfather, who’d been injured in a fall. But she also got to explore the role of faith in her life and the lives of her patients.

The evening before they begin seeing patients, Helping Hands volunteers go door to door spreading word about their clinic and offering to pray with residents. Silva feared she’d find this kind of evangelism awkward or intrusive.

“I had it totally wrong,” she says. “People actually expected and asked for us to visit. I was approached by a classmate’s mom who wanted to be sure we’d stop by her house.”

Helping Hands welcomes volunteers from any religion and doesn’t require participation in mass or prayer, but its dedication to melding spirituality and service is clear. Knabel says the experience reveals how faith can enrich the doctor-patient relationship—a lesson he puts into practice back home.

“I’ve become much more involved in caring for the whole person, and sometimes that means joining patients in their prayer lives,” he says. “I’ve learned that some patients are looking for that.”

Knabel knows firsthand how mission work can inspire budding doctors and seasoned physicians alike. His children Anne, Peter, and Daniel have accompanied him to Cotija on trips that encouraged Knabel’s sons to study medicine. Anne and Daniel will join him again on this year's mission.

For experienced physicians, the missions offer a rare chance to care for patients without the distraction of paperwork, insurance regulations, and other bureaucratic hassles. “You bring a sense of service home with you,” says Knabel, whose practice and teaching in Wisconsin focus on surgical dermatology. “It’s changed my view of medicine.”

Through their commitment to Cotija, Knabel and colleagues have made a lasting impact on the city’s health care infrastructure. Before long, the Helping Hands teams may find it’s time to shift their focus to needier communities, but Knabel says his connection to Cotija and its people won’t be broken.

“Cotija will always be a special place for me, just like my hometown,” he says. “Places like this become part of you.”

Story by Lin Larson; Portrait by Tim Schoon; Additional photos used with permission by Helping Hands Medical Missions

A Letter From A Volunteer

We saw over 2500 patients, operated on 46, and handed out more rosaries and prayer cards than I could count.  We performed urgent repair of a machete laceration on a man found during our door-to-door evangelization.  We took blood samples in the middle of the night to diagnose and treat numerous people suffering from elephantiasis.  With all the medical care, we were hopefully able to spread the Gospel to the people we met during the week.  None of this would be possible on our own.  But working together we made a difference in the lives of our brothers and sisters.

Each member of the team played a crucial part: the volunteers, the nurses and physicians, the HELPING HANDS team in El Salvador, Father Swanson, L.C., all the people back home praying for us and for the mission, and of course the people of El Salvador who were often evangelizing to us with their strong faith.

How Can You Help?

There are several ways to support our Mission and each is very important.

1. By contributing your medical or other skills to upcoming Mission trips.  Volunteers are always needed and welcome, and if you have medical skills, so much the better.  If you would like to volunteer, contact us to find out more and to let us know a bit more about you, your qualifications and your interests.
2. By making a monetary donation to provide direct support.  Funds are urgently needed for such essentials as transportation and medical supplies.  Automated recurring donations of any amount are especially important for us, since they allow us to confidently know we can afford to undertake new missions and expand our currently planned ones.  Without such reliable support, we are not able to reach as many of the poor and sick throughout the world which so urgently need our help.  To make a donation click here to go to our support page.