Members of the Alabama chapter of Baptist Nursing Fellowship (BNF) recently participated in a medical missions trip to Maracaibo, Venezuela. Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union consultant Barbara Owen coordinated the trip with missionaries Harvey and Sharon McCone.
Cardiac nurse Linda Chandler of Alabaster led the team of 11 women, which included nine Alabamians, one Texan and one Tennessean. This was her seventh missions trip, the second to Maracaibo.
The group flew out of Birmingham Jan. 11 and returned Jan. 19. They spent six of those days at work in Venezuela. Two days were spent traveling. Heightened airport security caused the traveling days to be long and tiresome. Some members of the party were selected for random, thorough checks, which included removing shoes and searching bags.
The Alabama team joined with a group of medical students from Louisiana State University and a medical team from Cuba to work alongside Fundabrez Baptist Clinic to have a medical jornada. A medical jornada is a blitz that uses a mobile clinic and team to provide dental and medical care for a specific community. It is usually conducted at local churches, and members of the church help with spiritual counseling.
The medical volunteers staffed triage stations and exam rooms in two churches to treat patients.
Dentists in “Alabama No. 1,” a mobile medical clinic purchased by Alabama churches, were seeing patients. The Alabama team treated 992 patients and witnessed 96 professions of faith at the first two-day clinic held at Iglesia Bautista Fuente de Amor (Fountain of Love Baptist Church) and its school.
In the evenings, the group met for devotions and shared testimonies with local church people.
Hamilton nurse Mary Ritch celebrated her 69th birthday on this, her first medical missions trip.” I am involved in the Marion Association missions trip every year to build a church, but little did I know the impact this trip would make on my life,” she said. “I gave my testimony in the presence of about 100 people through a translator in the McCones’ home, the Lottie Moon House. To have the privilege of doing this in the Lottie Moon House was very special to me.”
The group visited the Yukpa Community, a people group indigenous to Venezuela, where they gave out hygiene kits and sang songs with the children. A local pastor shared with the people. They also ministered in Sina-Mica, a village on stilts in the water.
It was a return trip for Chandler, who said, “The conditions were a little worse than I remembered. The poverty is great, and medical conditions are bad,” she said. “At our clinics and on side trips to the Yukpa Community and Sina-Mica, we diagnosed and treated TB, scabies, lice, parasites and the common cold. The majority of children have all of the above except TB. In Sina-Mica, 10 children had died in the previous three months from dengue fever.”
It can be a bit of a culture shock for an American nurse to visit these more primitive areas.
Helen Mininger, a nurse anesthetist from Florence, said, “In our hospitals we do complicated and expensive treatments to prolong lives. In Venezuela, people are dying from abscessed teeth, only needing a dose of antibiotics or a tooth pulled.”
Mininger has participated in 12 international missions trips, but this was her first medical missions trip. Why does she do volunteer missions?
“It is such a blessing to worship with people of other countries, lifting our voices in praise in different languages,” she said. “The world is no longer a faceless mass of lost and needy people. They have names and faces and needs.”
BNF is a Christian organization of professional nurses, which promotes continual professional education and growth for members and nurse missionaries.
For more information, call 205-991-8100 or visit the Web site at BNF@wmu.org.
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