Empty!

Just a quick note:

This morning I walked out to take some pictures of the CTC patients and encountered Virginia, doing laundry, out on the porch. When I asked her who all was in the CTC she replied,

"Nobody! It's empty! The two that were in last night went home and the one in observation is set to go any time."

So I went into the CTC yard to see for myself... sure enough, there was nobody around except the guard, and the lady that was in observation had left already!

So we're all empty! Praise God! We know from past experience that people could start flooding in at any time, but for now we are cholera free :)

Thank you all for your prayers! What a blessing it is to see God working through you and your prayers...

We'll keep you posted if things begin to develop again!

An update from Virginia..

This past week has been very busy again, but thankfully as of today we only have 4 patients admitted and a few in observation.  Last Sunday is when things picked up again, and we had 13 admitted and 50 in observation throughout the week.  Wilmon came up from T-Goave, and has been an amazing help, as always.  

There are just a couple of us left here for CTC work, so we had to put in some long hours, but it wasn’t too bad.  As much as I want cholera to be over, I am privileged to be able to be here and help those who are sick.  

Monday was another very busy day, with over 20 people coming through the CTC.  Jared left for home, Thea had to be in the clinic all morning, and Michael had to go to T-Goave, so I had to be in the CTC pretty much alone.  If Wilmon wasn’t around I wouldn’t have been able to keep up.  

Why so many people came was because they were scared. There was a Pastor who died of cholera in a certain area, and he didn’t get buried properly.  So everyone there is scared.  About a dozen people came from there, and I had to listen to their symptoms and decided who to treat and who to send back home with ORS.  Half of them obviously did not have cholera, and the other half I treated and sent home.  

Please pray that cholera would stop! It doesn’t seem to be ending, just dragging on and on.  It is hard to keep going sometimes when there is no end in sight. But God gives strength!  We need your prayers and support, and we are thankful for them!  

 

~Virginia

This man came in with Malaria, not Cholera.
We are treating him for it though and expect him to begin to recover soon.

A fresh onslaught!

Good morning!

Last night and this morning we've had a fresh onslaught of people coming into the CTC. As of this moment we have 5 in observation and 2 admitted. Please pray!

Some people wait in the courtyard during their observation time.

Michael and Virginia work with a dehydrated boy, inserting an IV into his right arm.

After a difficult search for veins they finally settled on one and got the IV going.
He should be recovering soon.

This man came in at 2am this morning.
He seems to be recovering well and is expected to make a full recovery.

Cots sit drying in the courtyard, freshly cleaned and ready for more patients, if needed.

Michael's baby goes home...

You'll probably remember the old man that was dropped off at the clinic a few weeks ago; if not, see the blog post here. We have began calling him "Michael's Baby" since Michael has been the primary caregiver, along with the fact that the man acts very juvenile most of the time. He oftentimes doesn't want to take his medication, spitting it out all over the place, and refusing to cooperate... It's quite amusing at times, frustrating at others, and sad the rest of the time. His wife is also a very bad caregiver. She doesn't seem to care very much, which is also extremely sad...

Today Michael decided to send him on his way, as his improvement has gone well, and he would be doing well to be going home. So, they got one of the mission's horses and he and his wife were on their way!

The wife holds the horse's halter as she waits for Michael and Maslein to bring her husband out...

They only live about 30 minutes away, but the man was too weak to walk.

Here Michael and Maslein are pulling him up out of his bed. He didn't seem to want to go...

Eventually, Michael just picked him up and set him on the beast. :)

All situated now! Ready to go...

Well... maybe not! He wasn't able to balance himself (either that, or

unwilling to) so his wife had to get on and hold him up.

After a "test run" in the CTC courtyard, they were on their way.

It looked like it was going to be an interesting ride... 

They were off to a rough start!

But eventually they got the hang of it and were doing well. 

As far as we know, they made it back safely!

Only a Servant

     Perhaps many of us think that mission life involves a glorious experience in which souls are being saved daily and we ride on the high current of spiritual feelings. This certainly does happen, praise God! We may even think that dealing with physical needs is less spiritual than ministering the Gospel. Yet the point is not in whether one aspect is better than the other, but  rather whether or not we are following the example of our Lord Jesus. In following His example, we are to be servants. During the entire time of His three-year ministry, He served others, even to the point of not having a place to rest His head or time to eat. I am certain that was His entire life pattern, even in the thirty years of relative obscurity. I believe the Scriptures teach that humility, compassion, and obedience were at the heart of His daily ministry.

     Indeed, our dear Lord said these words, “Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you took me in, naked, and you clothed me, I was sick, and you visited me, I was in prison, and you came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when did we see You hungry, and fed You? Or thirsty, and gave You drink? When did we see You a stranger, and took You in? Or naked, and clothed You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and came unto You? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Truly I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, you have done it unto Me” ( Matthew 25:34-40, emphasis added). 

     Howdy! My name is Jonathan and my wife’s name is Lisa. We are newlyweds from southwestern Wisconsin, a beautiful place with many trees, hills, and curvy roads. About a week before our wedding, cholera struck Allegre. My wife and I were in the midst of our wedding preparations. Suddenly, we were without our best man, photographer, and another friend or two, who sacrificed being present at our wedding so they could meet the desperate need in Haiti. 

     After we had been married for a couple of months, we offered to be available in case of a need for personnel in the CTC. Three-and-a-half months later, the opportunity came. Lisa and I had just finished spending time eating out together, and were shopping for groceries when the call came from Darwin. We spent an hour or two discussing and praying together, and knew what our answer would be. I called Darwin and told him, yes, we could go. We finished our shopping and bought one-way tickets that night. It was Wednesday, the fourteenth of September. The next day, we settled some necessary household matters and packed for our trip. By Friday evening, we were on our way to Haiti. 

     We arrived at the mission compound Saturday evening, and by seven o’ clock on Sunday morning, Anita, Lisa’s sister, was teaching us to work in the CTC. 

     Working in the CTC will reveal a lot about your character and test it repeatedly. What matters to God is not who you seem to be, but who you actually are. It means dealing with attitudes that want to rise when someone messes their bed again and again. It means giving bottle after bottle of ORS to each patient. It means emptying buckets of waste, cleaning someone up, or getting up at midnight for your shift. It can all be done with a contented heart and a cheerful smile. It is not a glorious job that involves much skill but it is a lot of fun! It is very rewarding to watch patients leave who were weak and failing when they arrived, but are now on the way to full recovery. 

     One particular situation that I would like to share is about a man who came to us almost dead on September thirty. He is a man who is not well-liked at all; neither by his wife, nor his neighbors. His wife and a few others brought him to the CTC thinking he had cholera. According to them, he had been vomiting every bit of food and water they had been giving him for the last eight days, causing him to experience severe dehydration. It was so severe that when he arrived at the CTC, there was virtually no blood flow to his legs and his eyes were so dry you could pull his eyelids open and they would just stay and stick where you put them. Also, he had a temperature of one hundred and four. However, he did not have cholera, but a life-threatening body infection originating from his abdominal organs instead. We could not pinpoint the cause of the infection to a specific disease since we did not have the option of lab tests. Saturday evening he was in a hopeless state with only a ten percent chance of survival. There seemed to be nothing to do. So several of us prayed for his healing, his salvation, that God’s will would be done, and that God would receive the glory. Michael (who is in charge of the CTC) gave the man a number of treatments for infection and a fever reducer. He is doing better every day, praise God! 

     Finally, we would like to express our thankfulness for the privilege and opportunity God has given us to work with cholera patients, the natives, Steve and his wife (the field administrator), Anita who forms part of the backbone of the clinic, and others as fellow-soldiers in the battle against cholera: Nathan, Jared, Virginia, Michael, Myron, and Katie Jo. May God bless each one of you richly and may He give the land of Haiti respite from the dreadful scourge of cholera. Amen.

—By Jonathan & Lisa Widowski

Things are looking up!!

Hello faithful prayer warriors! Greetings in Jesus' name!

Thank you for all your prayers for us over the past weeks; they have helped immensely as we have battled the epidemic. We have felt the prayers of the saints in so many ways, and have seen the hand of God move in mysterious ways. He has been so good and faithful in healing the sick, saving sinners, and supporting the weak.

Over the last few days, we have had only 2 people in the CTC! It has been so nice to take a break from the business that plagued us weeks ago. We have been able to catch a breather and recoup before anything else happens.

The two people are the individuals we mentioned in the last update: a young girl, and an elderly man. Both are doing very well and should be able to go home soon. The elderly man needs a little longer care, since he is battling an infection; however, things are looking up for him, and we hope for a complete recovery!

The elderly man didn't want to look at the camera for me...
He's quite stubborn! :)

Mis Leda from the clinic has been helping out too.
She has been on shift today.

Here's the little girl...
She was looking a lot perkier than she was the other day!
She actually talked with me a bit when I was there taking pictures.

Thank you again for your support!! Please, continue to pray for the Cholera Epidemic: if it be HIS will, that it would be stayed; but if it continue, that He would draw many souls to Himself through it!

Have a blessed day!

A young girl, an elderly man, good helpers, and a new PD pit...

This young girl is 7 years old, and weighs only 30lbs
She was severely dehydrated from the cholera, but also malnourished...

Her hair had turned red in some places,
a sure sign of a lack of nourishment.

See the red hair towards her forehead?
Jared said he's never seen it this bad before.

This is the elderly man that came to the clinic before we transferred him here.
Michael has taken him under his wing since he arrived.
It appears does not, indeed, have cholera.
Michael say that he thinks it's an infection that spread to his entire body.

He is a pretty stubborn man though!
He usually take his medicine without a fight :)
Maybe that's a good sign that he's recovering strength.

Jared and Virginia were working hard, so i snapped some pictures of them.
They're cleaning out buckets here...

Then it was just Jared working... and the others watching :) :)

Back to work again, in the office this time.
Some papers were accidentally filed incorrectly, so the hard workers went to it!

Our old PD dump pit is no longer available for our use,
so we're having a new one dug.

They should be done by tomorrow.
The pit will be about 7 feet deep once it is all finished.

Memoirs and reflections of a returning and rehabilitating Haiti Cholera Crisis Worker

I was asked to write an update about the “Memoirs and reflections of a returning and rehabilitating Haiti Cholera Crisis Worker” (quote from Steve) …and so, although I’m not exactly sure what all that includes that I should write about…I’ll just put down a few of my most memorable times in Haiti…for whatever they’re worth for the reader to read! 

The very next day after my arrival in Haiti, I started my first shift at the CTC…I found out very quickly that working there is very character building! Virginia Rudolph was my teacher for the first couple weeks, until the teams got switched around again…she was very patient in teaching me the basics of how to run things…marking charts, giving medicine, spraying people down with bleach water, filling ORS bottles, etc. There's really nothing that quite compares to seeing the Haitians come staggering in, or brought in on stretchers and then a few days later, to watch them go walking home with joyful faces so glad to not have died from cholera.  It's really an  addicting and rewarding work, being in the CTC…and one thing that I’ve thought about a lot since coming home, is the testimony that’s left behind for each one of the Haitian people I was in contact with…did they see Jesus living in me?  Obviously we weren’t there just because it’s a fun thing to work with Cholera! Did the Haitians get the bigger picture of what the whole Mission is about?!  For me, I didn’t know much Creole while I was there, so I had to speak more with my actions than anything…and I trust that God used me and the other staff workers for His glory while we were working there in the CTC!

One of my first memories of working with Bleach…or Clorox…was spraying out that yucky bucket, gritting my teeth and trying to not gag, as I had previously been informed “if you gag the first time, you might not be able to stop!” And the next day after my unforgettable experience of dumping the first bucket, I actually heard someone singing (might as well say who!) …yes it was Jared singing as the contents of the bucket got dumped out and then he sprayed it with bleach…I don’t remember if I ever got to the point where I could actually sing while dumping buckets, but I think I developed a good set of lungs from all the times I held my breath till I got the job finished. You just take a deep breath, keep your face back, aim, look away, and DUMP!  

Going on to the more serious side of things…I’ll write about something that has left a deep imprint on my mind since coming home…………….I was in the CTC working – actually all the work was done, I was just on shift taking a break in the Nurse’s Station, Kirsche (my partner at the time) I think was running an errand somewhere in the house or something, and she had left on Garment of Praise music…the song playing wasn’t exactly my favorite…actually, I had thought of it in the past as a rather shallow song…but anyhow, I was feeling so very tired just then and I decided to maybe try and take a little nap with my head on the table while there wasn’t anything else going on…so I lay with my head in my arms…only! That music playing! How could a person ever sleep with such music going?! I closed my eyes sleepily…too tired to care anymore. After awhile, through the haziness of my mind right then…I don’t know why, but I suddenly started listening to the words as my mind was shutting down…”this could be the moment! This could be your opportunity, just run through the open door…this could be the moment, brother that you’re created for!!!” I thought about it a bit…then as the words registered in my mind, I groggily peeped my eyes open and looked through the open door from where I was sitting, out to the front porch of the CTC…and there! Sitting right in front of the door with a little child on her lap watching me with big eyes, was a mother looking for all the world as though she was searching for something from me! Whew! I hadn’t seen her there before! And here I had been soo wanting to sleep…what would I do for her? I didn’t know Creole well enough to strike up a long conversation with her. Ah!! Those handy little “25 Bible Stories” booklets!  I asked her if she knew how to read…she didn’t but the lady in the next room over did! So I gave them each a booklet, which they were both very pleased about, and then I gave the rest up to the Lord…I don’t know how much a person can pick up from just the pictures in those books, but I trust God that somehow through all that He had a plan…I had done all I knew how and I knew that God would give the increase. Maybe someone else will have the privilege of leading one of them to the Lord some day! 

To this day, I have an alarm on my phone that makes me want to jerk. Well…let me reword that! Amanda and I shared a room together, and so we shared the same alarm, which was on my phone…and when it would go off, it was usually just before my midnight shift, and I felt sometimes like I had just closed my eyes and suddenly! There was that alarm ringing on the other side of the room blaring out the fact that it was time to awake and start my next shift…and I would bolt out of bed to quickly shut it off so it wouldn’t wake anyone else up (the walls are pretty thin, and you can hear about anything from the other side of the house!) …whenever Amanda or I would hear that sound, we’d have to wrench ourselves from a deep sleep to go turn it off. Once we were up for awhile it wasn’t bad at all…but it was just that initial first shock of getting out of bed to such a sound! 

Something I had to think of…reading Myron’s update and what he wrote about the diesel generator giving out…reminded me of a few embarrassing memories of dealing with that contraption myself… ;)

I had the “privilege” on my 4pm to midnight shifts to shut off the generator…when Steve was first showing me how to shut it off and everything, he said if I ever had any problems with it just to go knock on his and Shana’s bedroom window, as the front door is always locked at night…I don’t think when he said it he realized that I’d actually end up taking him up on doing just that! Well…he had made it look nice and simple to shut it off, so I thought this would be easy as pie! I think it was the first night I was to shut off the generator…my shift was ended, and being the responsible person I was;) I dutifully went to go shut of the generator as I had been shown. Whew! Steve had made it look easy. I turned the knob, I pushed it. The lever would NOT budge! I pulled, I twisted, and pushed again. I applied more of my Keller strength to it (ha!;)…still it wouldn’t budge…finally, not knowing what else to do, and knowing the generator should be turned off…I did what I had to, or what I had been told by Steve to do.  I went and knocked on Steve and Shana’s window…knock knock knock ”you awake?” well if they hadn’t been before, they were now!!! Imagine someone knocking on your window at midnight while you’re in the midst of a deep slumber…I think Steve was too out of it to respond, but Shana woke up thankfully! She told me to go around to the front door…so that’s where I met her and told her my predicament. She said sometimes you need to use pliers to loosen the lever a little and then it will turn over…so she went and got me some from inside the house somewhere…and handed them over to me. I thanked her and feeling pretty awful for waking her up, I apologized profusely about it…of course she was very gracious! :) We said goodnight and she headed back for her bed. Meanwhile I headed back for the generator, pliers in hand…feeling very much—although probably not looking so much—like a mechanic. I got to the door of the room where the generator is kept…only to find, to my horror and dismay, that I had shut the door…how or why had I done that??!! Maybe because it was midnight and my mind was already starting to shut down for the night…but anyhow, the door automatically locks once it’s clicked shut, and I didn’t have the key!! The generator was still running…and I was on the outside with no way in but to humbly go back to ask Shana for the key.

 The second time I went back, I think it was a little amusing for Shana…at least I’m hoping I read her right! ;) I told her about my newest dilemma, and she showed me which key to use from the keychain…this time I don’t know how much of an apology I managed to splutter out, but I headed back, not feeling so much like a mechanic anymore. I unlocked the door, used the pliers on the lever, and finally! It was music to my ears to hear the beautiful silence that followed after I finally got the motor shut off!

I guess Shana had decided not to wait for a third problem to generate itself from the generator, so she kindly stayed by the door till I got the motor turned off and brought the key back to her with another apology.

Yes…after that time, things went a lot better with the generator!  The only other problem I remember having out there was the next time I shut it off, I didn’t see the open can of gasoline and as I reached over to turn the lever, the hem of my dress somehow went down and whoop-tee-doo! Right into the gasoline it went…oooops!!!! Why did that happen to me? And especially right after my last big episode out there with the generator? Now I had a dress that smelled like gasoline even after soaking it in bleach water several times, and I needed it too! The poor person (Kirsche) on shift with me in the CTC next time I wore that dress…it probably almost fumigated both of us!

I could go on and on about my time in Haiti, but I think I’ve written more than enough already! Once I got my mind to thinking back to my time working in the CTC, I couldn’t stop all the memories from flooding in!

On my way home across the ocean I sat between a Haitian guy who only talked a little bit of English, and another man who was a Baptist from Cuba on his way back home from teaching a class he held for adult Haitians…most of the time he just sat circling questions in his teacher’s book he was reading, or drawing lines with question marks at the end of them…but we did talk a little bit and he asked me, “aren’t you a little young to be out travelling all by yourself so far away from home?”…well...it was kind of the way it had to be for my trip back, but I’d already had the same thoughts myself! Then I remembered something I had been told right before I left for Haiti while visiting Gospel Light in WI…”you won’t have to be alone! God is going with you!”  I told the man…”well…I’m notreally by myself…God is here with me!” He replied “Yes. That is very true! He is with you.” And right then I was so thankful to God for His Spirit within me…truly I couldn’t have made the trip at all without God’s hand of protection over my life!  Looking back now, I see so many times how God was with me…showing me which way to go and bringing verses to my mind while I was in that airport by myself…”ye are the light of the world…a city that is set on an hill cannot be hid”…yeah! I felt like a stranger all right! Even a Roman Catholic was asking me if I was a Nun. But although all those feelings were going on inside me of being strange, in a strange place, with strange people, I knew God was there… “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?”….

-Meredith Keller

An un-expected case...

This afternoon Anita was called to the clinic to check out a man that was reportedly stricken with a fever, and to assess the situation.

When she arrived, she found a man lying on a cot, severely dehydrated, very weak, and hardly able to speak. His wife was there, and she explained that he had been sick for over a week, and that they couldn't find anyone to carry him here until today.

She checked his vitals, and found very low blood pressure, and no fever.

After Michael came over to help diagnose the problem, they decided to bring him from the clinic over to the CTC.

They immediately put two IVs in him, and we carried him back over there.

After admitting him, he began to gradually stabilize.

Below are some pictures of the progression of events...