Thank you for the opportunity to experience a Medical mission trip to Pucallpa, Peru. I never felt God calling me to missions until this year. As every hurdle came, God effortlessly placed me over it. The financial assistance from the BMDF answered the prayer to that final hurdle that confirmed God wanted me to go on this trip.
I am very conscious of my health and my surroundings which affect it. While I was on this trip I learned that these concerns are a luxury. We arrived in Pucallpa, and instantly I felt the smog humid air around me. Many of the people that live in Pucallpa have lived their entire life and don’t know what it feels like to enjoy a soft breeze or light wind blow through the air without pushing dirt and pollution through the air. The problem with the living conditions that these people lived in was because of their geographic location.
Most of the terrain was dirt, the proximity to the equator and having jobs that required laborious hours in the sun meant they were going to have swollen feet, spells of dehydration and sore backs. It was almost as if they didn’t even know that hard work equaled strain on the body and long hours in the sun required proper liquid replenishment. We were able to address their problems by giving them some basic education on the importance of drinking lots of water and resting when they were tired. In Pucallpa there is a huge need for basic public health. The problem is that sometimes it can take a lot of money to clean up an area that has slowly collected years of mold and germs. The best way to address these issues would be to have more volunteers help clean up the area and go out into the communities and stress the importance of how someone can take proper preventive measures to stay healthy.
I learned that sometimes the greatest cure for someone is started with a smile and a God caring heart. So many people were just grateful for our group to visit them and pray with them and genuinely care about their pain.
This experience has changed me professionally and personally. Those day to day things I worry about to acquire more things I can worry about are so minute when it comes to what God really has for us being here. And one day I will be gone and hope others can look back on my life and see that I was able to help advance God’s kingdom by bringing others to Christ and they were able to feel God’s love through me.
Our first plane landed in Miami, Florida. Looking out the plane window I could see the Florida Keys and the sky rise apartments and huge luxurious condos and couldn’t help but think it is just stuff. Yes it is expensive stuff, but all the same it is still just stuff. And what we do as nation to help those in other countries learn about God is something that allows them to see true beauty. We can’t take a sky scraper building to them, but we can take the word of God and that reaches higher than any building ever possible.
This mission trip allowed us to go in as skilled medical, dental and public health students and address their physical needs. What we leave behind such as them knowing we are still praying for their health, the bibles and the testimonial bracelets will help their spiritual needs.
This experience has expanded my world awareness by reprioritizing what is really important in life to me and how what I do affects those around me. It would be foolish of me to think, I am going to another country to show and teach of God’s love by my examples when the locals are in my presence and then come back home and think that when people are at home and in my presence and not be expected to continue showing God’s love by my examples.
In the car ride home I thought how great it was to be home. Yet I couldn’t help but think all those people we left are still there. They still have to go back to the risk of worms and other diseases of their environment. I have been blessed with everything God has given me, yet I know it is all still his, and that unless I share my blessings with others, God will give it to someone who will.
Just like any resource that should be used to its capacity, unless I share all the different blessings God has shared with me why would he just let me enjoy it, when he could give it someone that would allow many to enjoy. Again, thank you for sharing your blessings with me, so that I could go and share it with others!
Posted on Wednesday, August 6, 2008
by harding