Senior Nursing Students Offer Aid, Gospel to Peru
Arriving in Peru
“When I first got off the plane, it was a surreal scene,” shares nursing senior Danielle Schaefer, recalling her first sight of the poverty in Puerto Maldonado, Peru. “You see stuff like that on TV, with the houses so close together and buildings that aren’t even nice. It was weird seeing it in real life.”
It was into the midst of this dirt and poverty that Schaefer and nearly forty other Americans had landed for a week of medical missions.
Partnering with Christian relief organization Operation Renewed Hope, Maranatha’s senior class of nursing students—eleven in total, with two faculty members—had flown from Chicago to the small Peruvian city near the Bolivian border.
Clinics Begin
They began their week of clinic two days later, on Tuesday, October 25, 2016. In the nearby town of Toledo, they served with practitioners, volunteers, missionaries, and local church members from both Peru and neighboring countries.
On Wednesday, the workers divided into two teams, one to set up clinic at a location across the river and one to minister to the Amarakaeire people a few hours upriver.
Sarah Kesti, another nursing senior, worked at the site across the river. “I was in dentistry . . . over on the edge of the woods. People would just wander out of the jungle for a treatment,” she recalls, “and we did not know where they came from.”
Senior nursing student Susan Brown spent the day at the upriver location, working with a church that had been started by local missionaries after a previous Operation Renewed Hope trip. She recalls how, in the evangelism sessions, the speakers “translated from English to Spanish, and then Spanish to the tribal language” in order to reach the local tribe members. “One of the chieftains got saved while we were there,” she shares.
Thursday the group reunited to minister in La Joya, Peru, less than half an hour from Puerto Maldonado. The previous day’s rainstorm had washed away the heat, allowing them to work more comfortably in temperatures that only climaxed in the seventies.
Friday, their final day of clinic, they returned to the same location to find people who had been waiting since 5:30 a.m. Susan remembers one woman who had “walked for maybe three, four, five hours to come so she could get glasses because she wanted to be able to read her Bible.”
People helping people
The members of the local communities weren’t the only individuals who impacted Maranatha’s students. Danielle shares the story of one of their team doctors who, after examining a young boy, gave him his own pen and encouraged him to study hard and even become a doctor someday. “It was something as simple as a pen,” she says, “but he was inspiring this little boy to become something bigger even in the midst of this town that was made out of tarps and wood. It was really special.”
The trip also gave the students themselves the chance to impact their patients and local Peruvians whom they did not treat. Sarah recalls the day she saw a little girl “who was just sitting there alone, on a pile of dirt. I walked over to her and gave her this teddy bear my mom wanted me to give to someone. And she said, ‘Gracias, doctora.’”
There were highlights of their medical experiences as well.
Susan says, “I listened for a heartbeat on a pregnant lady. That was pretty cool.”
“I enjoyed pulling a tooth,” Sarah joins in. “That was probably my favorite.”
Final reflections
Of the trip overall, she reflects, “You have to love people no matter what, no matter if they’re the right patient—the one that wants the medical care for their child and so they sat there for three hours in line—or they’re there for some smaller reason. It doesn’t matter. You’re still there to show love, compassion, and kindness. You’re there too to teach them about God.”
From beginning to end, the nine-day trip grew all of the nursing seniors through practical medical experience, exposure to a foreign culture, and interaction with other team members. But even through its challenges, the trip offered many unique blessings; together, nearly 80 volunteers from three continents ministered to a total of 900 individuals.
Over 70 of those patients received Christ as Savior.
Some of the team members who served on the trip—Jan Milton, director of Operation Renewed Hope; Buddy FitzGerald, one of the local missionaries in Peru; Dr. Harry Gibson, a dentist from Watertown, WI; and Christy Holshouser, a member of Maranatha’s nursing faculty—will be speaking at the 2017 GO.SERVE.LEAD Summit held September 21-23 on the Maranatha campus.
Visit www.mbu.edu/goservelead to learn how you can serve God in medical missions.