December 2011
Another year has almost come and gone! How good God is to us to let us have some of His time to redeem. We hope your Christmas and New Year are sweet and memorable this year!
We cherish this opportunity to touch base with you. We're aware that many of you donate to us and the ministry of the Clinic, and also that most of you will mention us and the work here in prayer before the Lord. And we're grateful far beyond the always inadequately framed words that will fill this page. Thank you!
Here are a new batch of photos with some explantions that should help a bit to flesh out our last few months of life and service!
Kids Against Hunger provided hundreds of protein filled meals for some of our drought areas. You just add water to these and boil. During our recent medical outreaches in the Mixtec villages of Tetepelcingo, Pueblo Viejo, and Ixtayutla, Laura gave these to the national workers and/or pastors.
The following photos show some mountain village medical outreaches where not only Laura and the regular Corban Clinic personnel worked but also the students from the Clinic's Community Health Workers course and from the Roca Blanca Spanish Language School, who were involved in preventive care teaching, children's programs, and interpreting for medical consultations.
Ashley, Emily, Grace, and Keisha were a great blessing in the villages, and got to practice their Spanish while experiencing the Mixtec culture and dialect first hand.
General Surgeon Dr. Merlin Kirby doing consultations in Tetepelcingo with a Spanish school student interpreting and a Community Health Worker student aiding. His wife, Helen, was a blessing to us all as well! Dr. Kirby also blessed many patients with minor surgeries at the Corban Clinic.
Disease prevention presentations are invaluable for these young mothers, many of whom marry and begin to bear children between thirteen and fifteen years old.
Spanish school students Milo and Jake get vital signs for a Mixtec patient.
It's a new morning and time to get to work again after a night camping out on a porch. Missionary Nurse Practitioner Jolynne Myers is happy and ready to go at it! Can't quite say the same for some of the rest, but it will be a great day in the village!
EMT Mark Bunner, his wife Coraleen, and Chuck and Rebecca Leidig from Kansas joined forces with some medical folks from a Mexican church in Querétaro. Debiltating foot problems are not uncommon, and this podiatrist is helping this Mixteco land owner and farmer. His status as a land owner is evidenced by the colored tassels on his shirt.
Spanish teacher, Irma, and students teach and have fun with the children while consultations are going on. The seeds of love and attention will be growing and harvested for years to come!
Grace is getting hugs from kids that often get very little demonstrative love from their families. Jesus was happy about the children coming to Him, and we get ample opportunity to receive them as well!
The Clinic evangelist, Jesús, gets a lot of opportunity to pray for and minister personally to our patients. Many begin their walk with Christ because of him.
Here's one example of that from a recent trip. A woman came to the consultation that we set up in her village. Ever since she had been beaten repeatedly on her head by her first husband she's suffered epileptic like seizures. Sadly, wife beating is not at all uncommon here, being part of the machismo that Mexican men are known for. She was checked, given treatment, and went home. The next morning she suffered a seizure while she was making tortillas by hand (a daily activity) and her new husband found her soon after with her hand on the hot comal, a special clay flat pan for tortilla making. She returned to the consultation site with second degree burns and a broken spirit. She was loved on, prayed for, and treated, and also received Christ with joy. The Mixteco pastor will continue with her and her husband, encouraging them in their own native tongue to "learn of him who is meek and lowly of heart."
Since Laura and I have been doing Sunday night Bible studies in the street in our own little fishing village using PowerPoint presentations that we create new each week, we're seeing more and more interest and openness among our fisher friends and their families. We've also been praying for a while for a spiritualist healer who practices here, but had not had direct contact with him. He surprised us a few weeks ago with a visit to the Clinic. He left smiling and loved, and with the best of Good News in his ears. There's been more positive contact since then, and we're praying for the unique joy of salvation for him and others. Pray with us for fruit of this kind, more fruit, and fruit that remains!
Laura and I have enjoyed seeing our future house begin to take form lately! Here are a few quick photos of the first two days of work.
I at least got into one of this blog's photos, even it's a only a backside view with my orange hat!
Here's how it looked at the end of day two, the manufacturer of the SIPS panels having used our house as a training project for local builders and architects interested in using his product. This was a blessing to us since those who came and worked had paid to come, meaning two days of free labor for our house! All of the walls and part of the roof will be up in another few days work. The rest of the house will go up a piece at a time between now and July 2012. It will be really nice to have some more space and to be able to have a guest room!
Here's a little special request for any of you who have WOT (Web of Trust) installed in your computer's web browser. Someone among their evaluators decided that the sites that we use for our ministry had been created by hackers. The result is that when the site is reached on the Internet a scary warning comes up informing all that they shouldn't open the site! According to them the only way to change this is to have enough people who use WOT go to their site and rate our pages. So, if you use WOT, would you mind going to http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/davidlaura.org , http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/rocablancaspanish.com , and http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/corbanclinic.org , to positively rate our sites. Sincere thanks!
Thank you for praying to the Lord of the Harvest concerning us and the work that He has given us here. Your interaction with us is not unnoticed or unappreciated by any means. God's rich blessing in all that you do and are! We're so very grateful for you.
Laura and Dr. Eder and Paulina's Nelly bid you a wonderfully pleasant and joyful Christmas and New Year! Until next time!
October, 2011
Hello again! Here's a quick update on some of our recent busy-ness for you who might be interested!
Laura and I had a great, although short, visit to the States this summer. One of the more costly sacrifices that often have to be made by missionaries is that of being far away from family. Unfortunately we didn't have a camera in hand for most of our visits, but we managed to get a few shots off.
My Dad still lives in Hialeah, Florida, where I grew up. Next month he'll be 91!
Laura's mom, Mildred (standing) meets weekly with these ladies that have known each other ever since the first grade!
Just for fun, we'll include a photo of some of our trucks in a roadblock erected during a peaceful political protest on the road to a town named Juquila where Clinic personnel, visiting interns, and Spanish school students were waiting to go for a medical and children's outreach. When the roadblock didn't lift, the team had to use a round about route through muddy mountaintop roads, delaying the trip considerably. These kind of things happen here with some regularity, and are part of what makes living and working here interesting!
The new Community Health Worker program in the Corban Clinic has finally begun after a year of planning and hard work! One of our newest missionaries, Joynne Meyers, Nurse Practitioner, heads up the academic side, while our Mexican staff doctor, Eder Matus, heads up the clinical part, the program itself being under Laura's direction. The course is taught three days of each week by Jolynne, Eder, and Laura. What a triumph and blessing for the towns that these four students represent! One is from Cacalote, and will be a help to Laura and the Clinic, another from a farther province, one from El Carrizo, a Mixtec village, and another from Panixtlahuaca, high in the Chatino area's mountains. The sheets are mounted on a wooden frame to divide the classes from the other Clinic activities. We need to expand the Clinic space to include dedicated areas for education. But, doing what we can with what we've got, we're confident that these women will be able to do a great deal of basic health care, education, and touching their own people for Christ in their needy areas soon!
Laura and I are sometimes asked to do a service for a family in our village who have a child graduating school, either kindergarten, elementary, middle, or high schools. The custom here is for the child to have a temporary kind of "godparents" for the ceremony. We've seen at least one of those graduates come to Christ, and it's always a pleasure to bless the family and celebrate what for many of them is a real milestone, and to encourage them toward more. The whole town turns out for these, and afterward there are multiple parties serving iguana, chicken, or beef barbeque tamales. The young lady, Ana Laura, receiving her diploma on the left is named after Laura because of the help that Laura provided for the family on previous occasions.
When we do medical brigades in the indigenous villages around us we often come accross folks with untreated eye ailments such as cataracts and pterygiums. We take note of these and contact them when a volunteer eye surgeon is going to be nearby. Just a few weeks ago the Clinic organized an eye campaign for cataract surgeries. Dr. Terry Elder very thoughtfully offered to pay for the transportation of five candidates that were ready, their family members, and the clinic team to make the 12 hour trip to the surgical compound in Cintalapas, Chiapas. The two American and one Mexican opthalmologists come and offer their services free of charge to make these surgeries possible. The results were great, and a great blessing to the people in our region.
prepped and waiting!
With ample beds, microscopes, and scrub nurses, Dr. Tom Robinson, his son Dr. Carey Robinson, and Dr. Guzman and the surgical team do dozens of cataract surgeries in just a few days!
Our own Clinic evangelist, hermano Jesús, teamed up with volunteer pastor, Harry Kahl, to pray for and with each patient. Interestingly, Laura and Harry worked under the same mission board in El Paso, Texas some 27 years ago, and may have been on a village mission trip together!
Some of the cataract surgery patients stayed the night in the Clinic after the long ride back since their villages were still far away. All the prognoses are very good.
I´m blessed to still teach in both years of the Bible school, and also to direct and teach in the Roca Blanca Spanish Language School. We´ve got a great group of students right now, among whom are many missionaries in training. If you or anyone you know is interested in a serious Spanish course here at Roca Blanca then we'd love to hear from you! The website is http://rocablancaspanish.com.
We'll be back in touch soon. There are a lot more things to write about! But for now please accept our sincere gratitude for mentioning us before the Lord of all, and for those of you who contribute so that we can work here. Until next time!
(this is our equivalent to the cowboy's "riding off into the sunset")
Dave and Laura
Our Blog
Hello! This is our first entry on this new blogsite. Some months ago our original site was destroyed by a hacker, so we've been working slowly to get this one up and running. It's our joy to be in contact with you again, even though it's only by this limited means for now!
Many of you will already have seen Laura during late July and now August. She's been in Mississippi with her family, and has been speaking in different churches, groups, and home meetings, presenting the work that we're so blessed to do in our southwestern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. She's now in Oklahoma for some more church services and a missionary conference. I'll be getting on a plane in another week, going to Rochester, NY, where my four children and their beautiful young families are at. Laura will join me there a few days later. Then after a week in New York we go to Miami to visit my 90 year young dad. From there we return to and resume our work in Mexico.
My son, Nate, and his wife, Erin, paid Laura and I a nice visit! They came during a week when there weren't any medical outreaches, and the Spanish school classes were a little lighter than normal, so we got to spend some quality time with them both, doing a boat tour of the Manialtepec lagoon nearby, ocean fishing, catching mahi mahi with our string and hands (no pole), and enjoying Nate and Erin's company.
God's kind and rich blessing has been all around and through us in the last months since we've written. Wonderful Lord! We've been blessed this summer with several medical interns from the USA, Ireland, and England, all in varying stages of pre-med or medical school. It's so great to see them prosper here and catch more of God's vision for the needy and the unsaved! And they've worked hard and been a big blessing with us.
Some of our visiting teams did construction projects, both on the base and in some villages. At the same time medical outreaches and children's programs were in full swing. Often dozens of people received Christ in a single day!
The Corban Clinic's expansion property is being cleaned up and prepared for its foundation this autumn. Here's also a photo of the current Clinic staff (also with visiting doctors Dave and Mary Kay Ness and nurse Bertha Guild). The salaries for the Mexican staff, as well as medications for the clinic and village outreaches, are paid for by your generous support. Thank you so very much! The kingdom of God is advancing with great folks like these!
God's matchless grace in abundance to you today! Until next time...
Dave and Laura