Help is still needed in Henryville, Indiana after tornados sweep through the village.

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:58:05 -0400

It’s amazing how quickly life can change. The community of Henryville, Indiana knows first hand the reality of that comment. Over the course of 24 hours life in this town went from normal to any thing but normal. On the evening of March 2nd, 2012, Henryville was hit with an EF4 tornado that completely transformed lives, homes, and this entire town. Life went from daily routines of school, work, and errands, to a life of picking up scattered pieces of their homes, looking for priceless memories, and searching for loved ones.

Today, 2 weeks later, residents of Henryville are still putting their lives back together, and for many, life will never be the same because of the lives that they have lost during this devastation. Within 48 hours of hearing about the disaster of the storms, we at International Aid immediately knew that we must help. Calls began being made to partners as relief materials we gathered and scheduled for delivery. We were able to fill a truck and deliver tarps, work gloves, rain suits, safety glasses, and paper products to help with the beginning stages of clean up. We dropped these materials off and made our way through the community. The sights were nothing but saddening to the heart.

Last week, while traveling to meeting in Kentucky, International Aid President and CEO, Brian Anderson found himself traveling through Henryville. Remembering the sights from two weeks before, not much had changed. Although a large portion of debris and brush had been cleared, life is anywhere but near being back to normal. If these lives have ever needed help, it’s now more than ever. The major storm has passed, the dust has settled, the volunteers have returned to their jobs and homes, and now the community of Henryville is left to piece life back together.

Please continue praying for this community, that God’s love would shine to them during this difficult time in their lives, and may they be reminded that no matter how alone or lost they feel, God is with them every step of the way.

Defeating the Silent Killers

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:22:33 -0500

The woman waited patiently as the mission team processed her samples with the small portable lab, but she doubted anything would help. She had been sick for longer than she could remember. She diligently took the typhoid medication she was given at the other clinic, but the slow-healing sores, fatigue, leg pain and infections wouldn’t go away. In fact, things kept getting worse, and her hope was fading.

When the nurse walked back over to her, she assumed it would be the same answer she had heard too many times.

“Typhoid?” she said.

“Diabetes,” she replied.

The patient’s heart sank. It was worse than she could have imagined.

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“Once you are diagnosed with diabetes in rural areas, they see it as a death sentence and many die within two years of starvation or complications,” said Queen Obasi, a Nigerian-American nurse who has overseen missions in Nigeria for the past five years. “All people think about is HIV, and diabetes is just creeping in and killing people.”

To make matters worse, the few diabetics living in rural Nigeria who have access to healthcare are often misdiagnosed. Rural health centers rarely have functioning laboratories and can only treat symptoms of what they think the problem is. On rare occasions when diabetes is diagnosed accurately, there often aren’t treatments in place to address the disease.

“For you to be able to treat any condition, you have to be able to do a correct diagnosis,” Queen said. “This isn’t happening in rural communities.”

This is why International Aid seeks to work with ministries like the African Community Health Initiative (ACHI) that can both accurately diagnose patients as well as provide a maintenance program for the patient.

ACHI is a U.S.-based nonprofit and the brainchild of Queen Obasi. Since 2006 (with the exception of 2010 because of political unrest), Queen has led groups of health professionals to her native country to conduct short-term missions in 12 of Nigeria’s most rural communities.

Queen said that every time she travels to Nigeria, she is overwhelmed by the need.

“By the time we arrive in a community at 8 a.m., we have 600-700 people already registered for our clinic,” she said. “We can only see 300 people per day.”

However, many of her patients aren’t suffering from what is often assumed to be plaguing these types of communities (typhoid, HIV, etc.).

“While we are winning the war against the scrooge of HIV/AIDS, the nation is losing a vital percentage of her population to chronic but manageable illnesses like hypertension, diabetes and malaria,” Queen said.

This is why, in 2009, ACHI sought out International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase, a portable medical lab that is used to diagnose patients accurately and timely, giving patients the greatest chance for survival. Since receiving the LIS, ACHI has diagnosed over 600 patients with diabetes and over 4,000 patients with either hypertension or malaria.

“Because we have a lab, our mission is more genuine,” Queen said. “We can take the lab where people need it, and get results right there.”

ACHI has also built centers in each community they visit. Health professionals are stationed at the ACHI Centers, and oversee maintenance programs that treat diagnosed patients throughout the year. This way, patients are consistently checking their blood pressures and sugar levels as well as receiving medications. With this program, they’ve seen blood sugar levels as high as 400 drop to 98 in one year.

This is how the patient at the beginning of this article’s life was saved. Once International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase diagnosed that her blood sugar levels were over 500, she was immediately placed into ACHI’s maintenance program and restored to health.

“To this day, this woman is alive because we were able to diagnose that it was diabetes and because of the maintenance program we were able to put in place,” Queen said.

Please pray for Queen Obasi and ACHI as they continue to serve the people of Nigeria. Specifically, please pray for:

• Protection as they travel to rural areas.
• God’s guidance as they conduct their work.
• Effectiveness in mission.
• Improvement in quality of life for Nigerians.

Partner Spotlight

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:17:37 -0500

As International Aid distributes life-saving medicines, hygiene products, nutritional supplements and medical equipment to partners serving the poor, we will often work with compassionate humanitarian relief organizations that align with our goal of bringing relief to the suffering and effectively do so.

However, physical healing is only a piece of what we strive to accomplish in our work. We also desire to have the recipients of our aid experience spiritual healing through a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Therefore, some of our greatest partners in the field are ministries that care about both the bodies and the souls of their patients.

The Myungsung Christian Medical Center is one of those ministries.

Located in Ethiopia’s capital city, the Myungsung Christian Medical Center provides advanced medical service with the primary goal of showing the love of Jesus to Ethiopia and Africa. The 159-bed hospital was started by the Myungsung Presbyterian Church of Seoul, Korea and provides everything from emergency treatment for world leaders to mobile medical outreaches to Ethiopia’s remote regions. They also offer free medical treatment for the poor.

The hospital is also committed to improving Ethiopia’s medical service, bringing in foreign experts to train Ethiopian medical professionals and putting medical staff through Christian faith-based training. They also collaborate with international organizations, evangelistic churches and other mission organizations so they can provide the best medical care they can, and ultimately strive “to help Ethiopians accept Jesus as the Lord and Savior, and accordingly gain eternal life.”

International Aid is so impressed by Myungsung Christian Medical Center’s dedication to medical excellence and the evangelism, and truly feels blessed to be partners in ministry with them. In the past year, International Aid has supported the Myungsung Christian Medical Center as they have expanded their Intensive Care Unit. In the past year, we have sent them shipments including equipment such as blood pressure cuffs, defibrillators, nebulizers, stethoscopes, stretchers, monitors, ICU beds and exam lights.

This week, we wanted to feature this hospital so that you would know the type of ministries International Aid aligns with. Also, we wanted to ask you to please pray for our partners at the Myungsung Christian Medical Center as they seek to bring glory to name of Jesus Christ in Ethiopia.

To learn more about this hospital, click here: http://www.mcmet.org

Healing in Haiti

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:57:05 -0500

Imagine having an unidentifiable illness that no one available to you can recognize. Maybe an illness you’ve never even heard of. Maybe it’s anemia, parasites or hyperextension. Maybe it’s something else, something worse. The only possible way to identify your illness would be to walk for hours, even days to the nearest certified medical lab for a diagnosis. But you know if you attempt the journey, you may never reach the facility at all.
This is the brutal reality for many men, women and children in parts of Haiti.
“That’s why we were so excited when we learned of the Laboratory-in-a-Suitcase,” said Herb Rogers, certified clinical laboratory scientist and licensed medical technologist. Rogers, who works with the American Baptist Churches, served as a missionary in Haiti from 1974 to 2003 and brought an International Aid Lab-in-a-Suitcase when he returned to the country last October.
International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase is a portable medical lab that is used to diagnose patients accurately and timely, giving patients the greatest chance for survival. Our labs enable health professionals serving in remote areas to perform the majority of standard diagnostics tests most frequently requested by field physicians.
Rogers returned to Haiti with a team of volunteers, a medical doctor, a nurse, several healthcare professionals and a translator. They loaded a dusty, beat-up truck with a Lab-in-a-Suitcase and headed to a remote village in Haiti, 45 miles outside of Port-au-Prince.
“What I liked was the design of the suitcase,” Rogers said. “It’s much more solid, more durable over difficult, rural roads.”
In just two days, they diagnosed and treated over 100 people with chronic diseases that are commonly treated here in the U.S., but without proper treatment can quickly lead to death for the people of Haiti.
“One of the great values of the Lab-in-a-Suitcase is you have the capacity to confirm or exclude a diagnoses for a number of diseases in a very short order,” he said. “With the Lab-in-a-Suitcase, you can almost immediately diagnose a number of diseases. By having this ability in the field, we are able to easily and affordably bring relief to the patients.”

The Perfect Gift

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:30:20 -0500

Jeanie Kellett couldn’t help but smile as she thought back over the past few days. The October METAD trip to Nicaragua had been such a great success — the rural cancer prescreening clinic they had planted a year ago was running smoothly, and a large shipment of equipment and health supplies for the clinic had arrived safe and sound. God had shown up in a big way, and many women’s lives would be saved as a result.
Now, miles away from the clinic, Jeanie was preparing to meet with a one of the head doctors at the Ascension Regional Hospital in Juigalpa—and, for the first time since she arrived in the country, she began to feel self-conscious.
For years, Jeanie had supplied this faithful partner in ministry with large shipments of equipment, including full laparoscopic units for their surgical rooms. But today, all she held in her hands was a package of reusable trocars — small, seemingly insignificant accessories for surgeries.
“I’m really sorry, I only have a small donation this time,” Jeanie said as she met with the doctor. “I’m so embarrassed to only give you this.”
But as she looked up at the doctor’s face, there was something in his eyes she didn’t expect:
Tears.
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Jeanie, a long-time partner of International Aid, has made it her mission to serve our Lord as He calls her, and currently that is to improve women’s health in Nicaragua. For over a decade, God has used Jeanie to equip missionaries and hospitals in Nicaragua’s poorest neighborhoods with International Aid medical equipment, vitamins, baby food and other health supplies.
While these shipments have contributed to feeding programs, building programs and health instruction programs, one of the recent focuses has been to help diagnose and treat the symptoms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer.
Through Jeanie’s network of hospitals and clinics, God has established a system where impoverished, underprivileged women in rural Nicaragua who are diagnosed in rural prescreening clinics are sent to compassionate larger hospitals that help them receive affordable cancer treatment and surgeries.
One of these compassionate hospitals is the Ascension Regional Hospital in Juigalpa, Nicaragua. For years, they have faithfully served those in need and, in turn, Jeanie has worked hard to serve them. She has secured many shipments for this hospital, most of which were large shipments containing equipment from International Aid.
When Jeanie arrived in Nicaragua in October, she initially hadn’t planned on making a trip to the hospital in Juigalpa. Therefore, her original shipment of equipment for the trip didn’t contain any donations for the city hospital. However, while she was on her trip, she received word from an IA employee who had found reusable trocars.
Trocars, which are small surgical accessories that help doctors conduct invasive surgeries, are typically disposable — however, Juigalpa had been asking Jeanie to secure some reusable ones.
“I have had them on my list forever, and finally International Aid found some,” Jeanie said. “They shipped them down to me, and I was able to bring them to Juigalpa.”
Yet, in comparison to previous gifts Jeanie had given to the hospital, a package of seven-inch trocars seemed incredibly insignificant. Thus, Jeanie was caught off guard by doctor’s emotional response to the small donation.
“You don’t understand,” the doctor told Jeanie. “We have had to stop laparoscopic surgery because we didn’t have these. We haven’t been able to treat one patient since we ran out of disposable trocars.”
Then Jeanie heard the words that brought tears to her own eyes:
“Because of this donation, we’ll be able to start laparoscopic surgery again tomorrow.”
Praise God for the work accomplished in Nicaragua last October, and for providing the small gift that now has saved numerous lives by making surgeries possible once again!