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American Nurses Travel Abroad on Medical Missions of Mercy
Jossie Gomez has been a registered nurse at Wayland Baptist University of Wayland, Texas for the last nine years. Although she had traveled to Latin America in the past, this time she was captivated by a strictly humanitarian kind of travel idea - to visit Brazil on a boat to dispense medical help to those who needed it badly.
Joined by 12 other missionaries from the Evangelistic Mission Assistance to Fishermen project, RN Gomez treated more than her own share of intestinal worms, anemia and scabies on a trek that extended from Isla Grande off the coast of central Brazil to remote villages of the interior. Since most of the villagers had no dental hygiene to speak of, the groups dentist was also very busy, pulling a lot of rotten teeth along the way.
In line with the tradition of the project, the team never left their boat for four days straight except when the weather conditions made it impossible to use their boat as a mobile hospital.
"The biggest blessing for me came from giving a shot to one lady who could barely walk from painful arthritis and had been that way for eight months," Gomez was quoted as saying. "She said through the interpreter that it was the first shot she'd had that didn't hurt, and the next day she came up to me and was saying, 'Thank you' and hugging me and telling me how she didn't hurt anymore."
Gomez is not alone to donate her medical knowledge and expertise generously in the service of the truly needy.
Gilbert Irwin and Medical Missionaries, a medical charity group based in the Prince William County close to Washington D.C., has recently delivered precious medical supplies to the poor in Haiti as they did for the last 11 years. Since the group has no budget of its own it relies on generous patron angels for all kinds of donations.
This year help arrived in the form of $4,000 worth of donations from Roberts Home Medical and Devilbiss, a major leader in oxygen concentrator technology. An oxygen concentrator is an electric-operated device that separates the oxygen in the room air from its hydrogen atoms and feeds it to the patient through a tube.
Another group of selfless doctors and nurses headed by Dr. Jay Grosse from the Medical Clinic in Jackson, TN traveled to a village in Guyana to take care of the medical needs of poor villagers down there. Back in 2004 Dr. Grosse again took 20 volunteers from his Church of Christ congregation to Guyana, followed by another trip in 2005 with a group of volunteers from the All Saints Anglican Church.
The Tennessee group included Mary Haynes, a registered nurse at Jackson-Madison County General Hospital. "One cannot imagine what it is like until you've been there," she is quoted as saying. "From a nursing perspective, it was like being back in the '30s or '40s in the States, as far as the poverty level. We saw malnourished children with hernias and women with goiters."
Among the ailments the group took care of were broken bones, early diabetes, diarrhea, a lot of malnutrition cases and parasites. No doctor visited the village for the last three years and the closest hospital was half-a-day's trip away. The visit of the Tennesseans was an act of pure compassion well appreciated by the locals.
