Adriunna Cavanagh (2 posts)

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/adriannacavanagh/journal

Grant Hebert

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/granthebert

Callie Cole

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/calliecole/journal

Pray for Mr. Cete Dillon.  He had energency eye surgery yesterday morning and is doing well.

Continue to pray for my momma as she has her first day in a new facility.  Pray for success in adjusting her medications quickly.

Continue to pray for Wayne and Cora Morris who live west of Amite.

Continue to pray for the Estay famiy as they wait for the birth of their new little one.

Pray for the Jenkins and McElveen families in the loss of Gerald Jenkins, the guy that gave me my first box of Vanentine cane.  That was in second grade!

Gerald M. Jenkins
(August 6, 1948 – October 1, 2009)

Gerald M. Jenkins was born on August 6, 1948 and passed away at 10:35 a.m., October 1, 2009 at Tulane Medical Center, New Orleans. He was 61, a native of Amite and resident of Roseland.

Gerald is survived by his wife, Carol McElveen Jenkins, Roseland; 2 daughters & son-in-laws, Lori Jenkins Trahan and Cory, Amite, and Kelli Jenkins Schwebel and Jacob, Roseland; a son, Ryan Blake Jenkins, Roseland; 2 sisters, Shirley Jenkins Primes and Francine Jenkins both of Amite; brother, Perry Jenkins and wife Carolyn, Amite; 3 grandchildren, Caden Andrew Trahan, Ian Alexander Trahan, Caroline Marie Trahan and (soon to be) Abby Schwebel.

Preceded in death by his parents, George M. and Beatrice Hale Jenkins.

Visitation will be at the McKneely & Vaughn Funeral Home, Amite, on Saturday, October 3, 2009 from 6:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. with a Celebration of Life Memorial Service at 7:30 p.m. in the funeral home Chapel.

An on-line Guestbook and a to view a video tribute is available at http://www.mckneelyvaughnfh.com

McKneely & Vaughn Funeral Home, Amite, is located at I-55N & Hwy-16W behind Mr. Tom’s Car Wash & Bond Eye Clinic.

Dr. Buck’ offers Mongolians help, hope

Dea Davidson
International Mission Board
Dr. A.H. “Buck” Rusher cuts a path through the crowd of Mongolians clutching X-rays and records, opening the outer office door and unlocking the inner. The clinic is open.

Every available seat is taken as a 47-year-old father describes his initial stages of lung failure. Listening to the man’s chest, “Dr. Buck” makes a hard assessment.

“You can’t make a bad lung good, you can only make it worse,” he says. “I’m afraid if we do the operation, he will die. It’s better for nature to end his life than me.”

An hour and eight patients later, the clinic closes as the award-winning general surgeon attempts to shut the door while changing clothes. He dons teal scrubs, cinching them around a frame 15 pounds lighter than when he began his tenure two years ago.

Heading into surgery
Pounding down the surgical wing of Ulaanbaatar’s First State Hospital, Buck enters a prep room a thousand miles from the countryside hospital he visited last week. He scrubs in using real soap, not detergent, in a sink used only for pre-surgery. A white-capped nurse pulls a fresh scrub shirt over his arms. For this operation, there will be no delays waiting for an anesthesia machine.

Beep … beep … beep … beep. The heart monitor is the only sound permeating the room as Buck takes his place next to the patient.

“I don’t like to play music in the operating room,” he says of the silence. “I feel like I’m entering a holy temple. I don’t like people to have their attention diverted.”

Dr. Nyamkhuu, his partner and the country’s most celebrated surgeon, pauses as Buck takes a scalpel in hand.

“Lord, help us with this case,” he says.

Nyamkhuu nods at the prayer.

Friends across cultures and time
Theirs is a 15-year friendship, marked by tragedy and joy. He is one of three physicians Buck brought to the United States for training following his first short-term visit to Mongolia. While there in 1993, Buck was moved by a medical community that deserved a chance to make progress after communism. Although they didn’t share a language, Buck brought the doctors to his practice and home in Jonesboro, Ark., for one month. The trio trained in laparoscopy, becoming the first laparoscopic surgeons in Mongolia.

“There was a lot of gesturing, pointing and diagramming,” Buck says of the trip. “I looked like a mother duck with goslings behind me.”

Saying goodbye to one of these mentees one year later was a defining moment in Buck’s Mongolian journey. After a celebratory meal during his second trip to the country, Buck and his wife, Pam, contracted food poisoning. So did the entire party. Three days later, when Buck was stable enough for a medical evacuation out of the country, he went to see his friend.

“We saw him in the ICU before we left,” Buck says, remembering. “I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both knew he was going to die. We stood around his bed and cried. Two days later he died. Had he been in a more developed place, he wouldn’t have [died]. I am really grieved by the fact that if I hadn’t been sick, I could have attended to him.”

Pushing through his grief
That grief could have kept Buck from returning to Asia. Instead, the loss of a life he’d poured himself into fueled him to a deeper commitment to Mongolia and to reaching one of its influential people groups — doctors. Responding to a request for Southern Baptists to serve as overseas medical workers, the Rushers first planted themselves in Mongolia in 2001. The move fulfilled Buck’s life dream to use his skills in vascular, chest and abdomen surgery for Christ.

“My people group has become the doctors — especially the surgeons — of Mongolia,” Buck says. “As a result of finding the Lord their lives have completely changed. Their wives see something different in them. Hope.”

That group of hopeful doctors formed an English Bible study in 2006 that later became a church. For their Easter 2008 service at a cancer hospital, the newly christened Shine Alxam (New Steppes) church had a high attendance of almost 50. The group of medical Christians now shares Buck’s perspective on life, one far different from Buddhist doctors and their patients.

“Patients feel life is not all that valuable because you come back,” Buck says. “Doctors don’t see death like I do. I see somebody’s heading to eternal life.”

Often complications
Holding on to precious life is difficult when the post-operation care causes complications. Making rounds before surgery, Buck finds a man tampering with his wife’s stomach drain, causing the tube to reverse the bacteria. Walking on to the Intensive Care Unit, a doctor teaching a group of residents calls him over for a consult. Rolling the patient, Buck discovers bed sores. These cases provide teaching opportunities.

“I just had contact with 20 students,” he says, pulling off rubber gloves. “If they notice my lapel pin or manner of treating nurses, maybe they’ll see that I’m following the Great Physician.”

Mongolia’s medical field is no small population with 6,637 doctors for the country’s 2.5 million people — one doctor for every 375 people. Mongols don’t go into medicine for the money. After paying for school and their 18-month residency, each makes approximately $150 per month through the socialized system regardless if they are a cardiac surgeon or a general practitioner.

As Buck builds rapport with these physicians, telling stories like the prodigal son before a gallbladder or liver surgery, he is giving them a lesson they don’t expect. Nyamkhuu’s eternity was also changed from his work with Buck. He came to faith 10 years after he first heard the Good News.

“God really did something when He let us meet,” Buck says. “When I met him, it became important to learn Mongolian so I could tell him about Jesus. The friendship superseded language.”

Partners in touching the countryside
“Big wolf” and “Little wolf” (as Nyamkhuu calls them) are a light in the capital as well as in the countryside where they offer their services to small aimag (regional) hospitals, scattering seed as they travel. In the western city center of Khovd, Nyamkhuu and Buck offered surgeons The Purpose Driven Life book and New Testaments between surgeries. The last night of their trip, the surgeons came to their apartment carrying fish and sheep meat. Close to midnight, they began asking: What do Christians believe? Nyamkhuu, the country’s foremost surgeon, answered with conviction and influence while Buck backed him.

“Nyamkhuu and I can read each other’s minds,” Buck says. “It’s like dancing — you just know what the other steps are going to be.”

As Buck leaves the hospital each day, he pauses on Ulaanbaatar’s streets to say, “Thanks, God, for the opportunity to live here and work.”

“There’s nobody who has had a better medical opportunity than I’ve had here,” he says. “I’ve had an open invitation to do what I want to do. This is our people. When we’re home, our prayer is for Mongolia.”

Update: Several months after the Rushers completed their most recent stint in Mongolia and returned home to Jonesboro, Ark., Buck was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Following surgery and radiation combined with chemotherapy, he is again receiving chemotherapy through November. Aside from a little fatigue, he was feeling few side effects, said Pam, when we talked with her in early August.

“We feel part of the reason he’s done as well as he has is around-the-clock, around-the-globe prayer,” she said.

What has happened is an affirmation of their decision to go “when the Lord told us to go,” rather than waiting until after retirement, she added. “He (God) knew what was coming.”

Act

Specialists in fields such as pediatrics, gynecology and radiology are highly respected in Mongolia. For more information, contact ripetoharvest@pobox.com.

World Hunger Day

Kenyan villages overflow with famished hearts, stomachs

9/25/2009

By Caroline Anderson

SAMBURU, Kenya (BP)–Charlie Daniels (no relation to the country music legend) is in mid-sermon when an elderly woman faints. It isn’t the Kenyan heat that’s the culprit — it’s hunger. She has not eaten in four days.

“Is there any food?” the woman’s son asks. “Please, anything,” he pleads. No one volunteers.

Daniels stops his sermon and retrieves a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from his truck.

Village women slowly feed the elderly woman tiny pieces of the sandwich.

Daniels asks why no one answered the son’s plea for food.

“There’s no food here,” the people respond.

It’s been three days, four days — or more — since any of them have eaten.
Daniels, a Southern Baptist missionary in Kenya, heads to a nearby town in search of food in a country that’s already skeletal from famine.

Drought and famine are close cousins in the Samburu district in central Kenya. Crops have shriveled from the lack of water. Daniels’ wife, Sandra, says there has not been sufficient rain since last November and livestock is dying.

In January, the Kenyan government reported more than 10 million people could be facing starvation. The Kenya Food Security Steering Group, which acts as an advisory board on issues of drought management and food security, reported in September that 3.8 million people in several districts, including Samburu, are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance.

When Daniels drove to the town of Kisima to buy beans and maize meal for the villagers, he used World Hunger Funds to pay for the supplies.

As he returns to the village, the crowd has swelled from 25 to 50 as word spreads that someone is bringing food. The two 200-pound sacks of beans and maize meal will feed the families for another week.

“Thank you for bringing the food when you did,” a Samburu man later tells the Daniels. “I would not be here today if you had not come with the food.”

Everywhere Charlie and Sandra travel in the region, they are met with food requests. There also is a great need for medicine, rides to hospitals and money for hospital bills.

The Daniels have formed a plan with Baptist Global Response, an international relief and development organization, to help alleviate the hunger needs they are witnessing.

Mark and Susan Hatfield, who work in sub-Saharan Africa for Baptist Global Response, helped the Daniels design a relief project to feed 4,800 people a month for the equivalent of $5.11 per person. The money, $24,528 in total, is coming from the Southern Baptist World Hunger Fund.

Despite the drought, the Daniels are seeing God at work in great ways. Almost 300 Samburu have been baptized this year. One Samburu leader has been instrumental in starting 10 new churches since January.

Oct. 11 is World Hunger emphasis Sunday. Go to imb.org/worldhungerdonations to give to the World Hunger Fund. Find more ways to help alleviate world hunger at baptistglobalresponse.com and worldhungerfund.com. To watch a short video on hunger relief efforts in Kenya, go to http://www.baptistglobalresponse.com/blog/?p=75.

Caroline Anderson is a writer for IMB. Sandra Daniels, a Southern Baptist missionary in Kenya, contributed to this story.

Obedient Ordinary People

Volunteer nurses give shots for Jesus

9/29/2009

By Caroline Anderson

RICHMOND, Va. (BP)—“I’m down to Barbie Band-Aids. Sorry, dude,” nurse Joe Thomas tells a future missionary in his mid 20s after giving him a shot.

Thomas and nurse Katrina Otto are long-time volunteers at IMB (International Mission Board) immunization clinics held at the International Learning Center near Richmond. Their patients are missionaries participating in the two-month orientation to prepare for overseas service. The nurses administer shots for everything from rabies to Japanese encephalitis and yellow fever.

Otto, an emergency room nurse at Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., has been volunteering since 1999. When she accompanied a friend to IMB for a missionary orientation in 1998, she realized the shot clinics were an excellent opportunity for her to use her nursing skills. She also has a special place in her heart for missionaries — her parents were North American Mission Board missionaries to Alaska.

Thomas, a nurse in the intensive care unit at St. Luke’s South Hospital in Overland Park, Kan., heard about the opportunity through Otto, a fellow church member at Lenexa (Kan.) Baptist Church. After going with Otto to a missionary orientation at ILC in 2000, Thomas committed to returning as a volunteer. He sees volunteering as a way to be involved in missions while using his God-given talents.

EXPERIENCE PAYS OFF

Thomas and Otto’s years of working together at the clinics have paid off, especially for shot recipients.

Swab with alcohol, then one, two, three — poke. The nurses’ needles puncture each arm of the patient in unison.

The reactions vary. Some victims scrunch their eyes shut. Some stare placidly at photographs from South Asia and Africa on the clinic wall. Still others crack jokes during the procedure.

Otto and Thomas attempt to lighten the mood with a little humor of their own. In fact, they have worked together so long they coordinate their jokes.

“Thank you for choosing IMB for your immunization care,” Otto says as a patient exits the room after receiving four shots, two in each arm.

“There will not be a quiz later,” Thomas adds as he hands out information about the vaccines administered.

SACRIFICIAL GIVING

Four times a year, Thomas and Otto fly to Richmond from Kansas at their own expense. Airfare isn’t cheap, but God has always provided, Otto says. The nurses say the rewards of volunteering far outweigh the cost.

“One of our goals is to be a support to the full-time medical staff and provide them with what they need,” Otto explains. “God spoke to us about coming, and I’m honored to be a part of it.”

Vaccinating hundreds of missionaries and their families at each orientation is a feat IMB’s full-time medical staff couldn’t accomplish without Thomas and Otto’s help. This past summer, 3,000 shots were administered. At one session, 486 shots were given in just 2 1/2 hours.

An average of 12,000 to 15,000 shots are dispensed at ILC per year which, according to Sandy Hammack, an IMB clinical nurse, makes IMB one of the largest administrators of immunizations on the East Coast.

The volume of work makes IMB’s medical staff appreciate Thomas and Otto’s servant hearts even more.

“It’s significant because they not only come at their own expense, they use their vacation time,” Hammack says. “They take off four times a year — for each of the orientation sessions.”

But their dedication doesn’t stop there. Both nurses sometimes work the graveyard shift so they are able to fly out for an IMB shot clinic that same morning. They are careful to plan mission trips and work schedules around clinic dates. They’ve even turned down job offers because they wouldn’t be able to volunteer at ILC.

FURTHERING THE KINGDOM

During the past decade, Thomas and Otto have vaccinated thousands of babies, toddlers and adults headed overseas. Their continuity and experience make them a valuable asset, says Connie Burton, medical department administrator.

“We’ve established a certain skill set, and to get to use it to further the kingdom, that’s really enjoyable,” Thomas says. “Ever since I became a Christian, I had an interest in missions. For whatever reason, God has not called my wife and me to full-time missions, but this is a place I can contribute to international missions on a continuing basis and do my part.”

Spending time with the missionaries and getting to hear their stories is what Thomas finds most rewarding.

“We [have] heard some fantastic stories of God working through them and how they were called and the conflicts they go through to get here and the commitment they make to go,” he says.

Another benefit is seeing firsthand how Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and Cooperative Program funds are used. The immunizations, some of which can cost $100 or more, are paid for by Southern Baptist contributions.

When Thomas and Otto return home, they share their experiences with their church family.

“We get the privilege of coming in and seeing all the support provided for the missionaries,” says Thomas, “and we try to encourage people from our church to get a glimpse of what is going on.”

PRAYER PARTNERS

One sacrifice both nurses make is time away from their families when they come to Richmond every few months. Otto’s husband is disabled and Thomas’ wife is continuing to recover from a serious car accident. But the prayer networks they’ve established are a major support. In addition to their church, they have prayer partners in the IMB missionary community.

When Thomas’ wife was in a car accident in 2005, he was unable to make it to several immunization clinics. But he knew he and his wife were being remembered.

“They took it on as a group to pray for her,” he says. “There were [missionaries] not only here [in Richmond], but when they went all over the world, they were praying for her.”

Otto adds, “When things happen in our family, these are some of the first people we call to ask for prayer.”

When they aren’t busy with clinics and their jobs, Thomas and Otto frequently go on mission trips. On several occasions, they’ve encountered missionaries on the field who they inoculated at ILC. These full-circle moments remind the two that every Christian plays a part in helping fulfill the Great Commission.

“God is doing fantastic things and He’s not calling ‘supermen,’” says Thomas. “He’s calling ordinary people who are willing to commit in obedience, and it is just such an encouragement to come [to ILC].”

Caroline Anderson is a writer for IMB.

I hope you enjoyed reading Caroline Anderson’s stories and that your heart was touched by the work of the people she described.

Anna Lee