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June 2010 I am, indeed, back in Perth and enjoying sleeping
in a bed, showers that can be left on while I wash, food without chilli, the
freedom to go out alone – and some colder weather for a change, though I
suspect the novelty of that will wear off quite soon. Leaving
Mexico meant lots of farewells, lots of meals and lots of gifts. I have a
fluffy pillow with a heart and a lamb embroidered on it! AND a toilet seat
cover set – seat cover, cistern cover, and matching hand towel – in bright red
satin with gold frills and embroidered with green holly leaves – very
Christmassy. I always find it a struggle when people with little money
buy extravagant gifts for us. The
church who hosted us held two Sunday services ( each 3 hours long!) dedicated
largely to farewelling us. We knew we were doing a major presentation –
PowerPoint of highlights and lots of testimonies – at the evening service, but
discovered at 11.05 a.m. that we were also taking the 11 a.m. service! We
coped. Two people wrote sermons while the rest of the team did impromptu
worship! Leaving
was a major production as our hosts insisted on accompanying us to the airport
to farewell us again. (No dumping you at the airport entrance in Mexico!) It
took 5 trips over 3 days to get everyone on their respective flights, but we
did get everyone safely back. Most of
our students have already left to go to their home countries and I am
officially finished as staff of the Introduction to Primary Health Care School.
My mother turned 90 yesterday and I am coming home to her official party
(delayed a week to accommodate my commitments here) next week. I have been
asked to staff the Foundations in Education School that is being pioneered here
in July – September. I have agreed to do it though I am not sure what I am
getting myself into. I have no clear plan after the end of September – am
assuming God has one for me!! I will be
in Tauranga for the last week of term, so hope to catch up with you. Love and
blessings Jan
May 2010
We finished our time in India with a free medical clinic – working almost non-stop for 7 hours and saw 115 people. We de-wormed all of them!! I saw my first case of filiariasis (elephantiasis). A young woman with a massively swollen leg. We left meds and instructions.
On our last day, we did a massive rubbish clean-up in one village. We felt thoroughly contaminated by the time we had finished. I pretty much abandoned my clothes, got cleaned up and took the aptly named Uttar Banga express overnight to Calcutta.
Overall, my impression of India is of dirt, heat, noise, colour, overwhelming poverty and the all pervading smell of urine. I am in awe of Todd and Cindy who have been there 9 years and are making a real difference in their community.
In the Calcutta airport, I got out the sweets that I had been given as a present - sealed in a ziplock bag - to find a hole in the bag and one of the sweets almost entirely eaten. They had been in my backpack since we left Siliguri! I freaked and emptied out everything expecting to find a sleeping rat. Ridiculous, I know, to think that it would still be in there after a taxi ride to the airport and going through the airport scanner!! Still, it was unsettling to think of it rummaging through my backpack and chewing away in Calcutta.
On the 16 hour flight to L.A., Yfke (my travelling companion) threw up 5-6 times (Thank God for sick bags in the pockets as we were in the centre 2 seats in a row of 4) and had 3 bouts of diarrhoea. In L.A. we mutually decided that sleeping on the airport floor as planned was a bad idea, so we booked ourselves into a hotel and enjoyed real beds with clean sheets, a nice bathroom, fluffy white towels, free internet, flat screen TV and a free breakfast thrown in. We washed our clothes in a washing machine and dried them in a drier and felt as though we were living in total luxury!
Then we got to Mexico City. Our entire team has finally managed to get here. Our accommodation is a little tight. We 10 women sleep like sardines on thin mattresses on the concrete floor of one room and 3 boys live in slightly more comfort in a second room. We have a small kitchen, tiny bathroom and can use the church office (with internet) some of the time. Our living space is the walkway from the top floor of the church – where the pastor and his family live – and the bottom floor – where church services are held.
We don’t spend much time at home. There are 4 churches that we work with and we also help out at the World Vision offices and clinic. We preach in churches, do health care teaching and seminars, run clinics, have visited a prison and regularly do ‘market evangelism’ – we set up a tent in the market and advertise free blood pressure and ear and eye checks and free prayer. The people from the local church join us and it is amazing. People flood in – in one morning we saw 39 salvations and 22 instant healings! One 13 year old boy came with an injured wrist. We could not treat him without a parent present so offered to pray. He sat there rolling his eyes at his friends as a couple of our team prayed, then suddenly began moving his wrist in all directions and grinning. He wanted to know how they did that, so they told him about who really did it – and he gave his life to Jesus! This kind of stuff happens a lot. We had lunch with the pastor of one church who said that the Sunday after our last market evangelism, 20 people came to his church to report that they had been healed after we had prayed for them!!
It is incredibly dry here and we are all coping with cracked lips and heels, and noses clogged. Very charming. Don’t stop praying for our health! Our neighbour here has been held up at gunpoint and robbed on the local buses twice in the last 2 weeks, so prayers for our safety would be appreciated.
Many thanks
Love and blessings
Jan
March 2010
In 3 weeks, we leave on outreach
– I go with a small team to India for 3 weeks and then on to Mexico to join the
main team. We are hearing great things from the teams already in Mexico City –
salvations, instant healings, Government officials attending discipleship
training seminars, churches joining YWAM groups in outreach. One team is
working in an area which has the reputation for being the most dangerous place
in the whole of Mexico. 200 of the
youth from there are now travelling regularly into the Zocalo (centre of the
city) to do evangelism.
Here in Perth, class continues.
Recently, Allan Robbins from Kona was our guest speaker. He is with Water for
Life and had heaps of interesting – and some gross – info and pics about water
and worms and diseases associated with water. If you
ever want to do any sort of community development project anywhere in the world
- he will have a useful contact there! He arrived on Saturday; Kathy and I took
him out on Sunday, we had a multi-cultural dinner on Monday night (each student
made something from their home country) and watched a movie, class on Tuesday
night, door to door evangelism (something I swore I would never do) on
Thursday, class hospitality to staff, which involved lots of baking, on Friday
morning, visit to see kangaroos on Friday evening, followed by regular Friday
Night service. On Saturday, my house mate got married in the morning and we did
a carwash fundraiser in the afternoon!
Jono Turner, a pastor from Palmerston North, spoke
to our school one morning. He told the story of his visit to Jerusalem. His
guide was an Arab Christian and Jono asked how he became a Christian. The guide
asked if Jono knew the story in John 4 of the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at
the well. He said, ‘I am from that town and we have all been Christians since
that day.’ WOW!!!
Our speakers this week are
Phil and Sue Short, a couple from England. Phil brings a suitcase of scale
models with him. We have had little water filters of various kinds dripping
water all over our floor and a well with a pump that squirted the students in
the front row! 3 different types
of latrines have been constructed in miniature – Phil also has several working
models to show us, complete with ‘concrete’ slabs and little wooden toilet
covers. He claims he can’t draw so he has to build models!
On Friday, we all got up
ridiculously early to be at the base by 5 a.m. to join in ‘One Voice’ – a
Genesis linked 2 hour worship session. We had links with 2 YWAM bases in
Mexico, 2 in USA, 2 in Switzerland and 1 in Colombia and each base took a turn
at worship leading. It was a great time, even if the picture and sound was a
little odd at times.
The next 3 weeks leading up to
outreach are going to get a bit crazy, so prayer for sanity would be appreciated
– and for our complex travel arrangements to all work out.
Love and blessings
Jan
February 2010
We have just finished a week of celebrations for
YWAM International’s 50th anniversary and YWAM Perth’s 25th.
An amazing and exhausting time – lots of worship and prayer, lots of looking
back at all that God has done. Lots of talking, lots of good teaching, lots of
vision for the future, lots of funny –and touching - stories, lots of food and
very little sleep. Loren and Darlene Cunningham were here for 2 days. In
50 years, YWAM has grown to having 20,000 staff in 1300 bases in 177
countries!! YWAM Perth started with just 8 people and now has close to
300 staff.
It is quite a relief to be back to something like
normal and get the school going again. This week we have Dr Suneetha, from
Hyderabad, with us. he comes every year and is always my favourite speaker. He
works with HIV/AIDS sufferers and is trying to lure us to Hyderabad to do
seminars for pastors.
We are already beginning to prepare to go on
outreach. I am going to Siliguri (India) first with a small group, to do a
Simple Health Care seminar. The others will go straight to Mexico City and we
will join them in late April.
Peter Warren from the Leprosy Mission came
recently, as he does every year, to teach about leprosy. Thus year he had an
amazing 85 year old woman, Audrey Tomlinson, with him. She was a nurse in
the Liverpool slums, then in Malaya and later in the northern territories –
always working with the very poor. When she was 80, she went on a trip to
Antarctica and a year later did a trip with the Leprosy Mission to India. She
was hilarious and never stopped talking all through lunch!
Jan
January 2009
Hi to all at HTT
It was wonderful to be able to get back to NZ briefly in November and catch up with some of you at Diane and Rich’s wedding.
Since returning to Perth, I have been busy preparing for, and am now
staffing, the Introduction to Primary Health Care School - the school I did
last year.
Christmas here was interesting! 400 of us gathered at the base for
lunch - a magnificent catering feat with heaps of food. We had 750 kg of meat donated to us (We
did not eat it all on Christmas day!), prawns, asparagus, fruit..... It took us
most of Boxing Day (a huge picnic at the beach) to eat the leftovers.
I am not in the picture – I took it!
But I was in the kitchen earlier preparing food.
The IPHC School has been going
for 1 month. We have 11 students. 5 Americans, 2 Canadians, 1 Aussie, 1 Kiwi, 1
Fijian, 1 English. 2 guys and 10 girls. Age range 19-42. Most of them have had more YWAM experience than I have
– but I claim more life experience!
2 of the girls are working with YWAM in Third World countries and have
come to add health care skills to their repertoire. Lisa has joined us on
staff, so there are now 4 of us to share the work. It is quite different to
teaching at Bethlehem College – with a lot more one on one ‘discipling’ and
less actual teaching – though I ‘facilitate’ the numerous practical sessions.
(Am feeling a little apprehensive about getting to the session where we
practice giving injections on each other!)
The pictures give the impression that we eat rather
well here at YWAM Perth. These are NOT pictures of our every day meals!! This
was our ‘welcome to Perth’ breakfast for our students.
We
began the year with a week of teaching on the nature and character of God. We started
by reading Genesis 1:1-4 and then pulling out things we could learn about God
from these 4 verses. We got to 23 points, though some might have been
stretching the point a bit. However, it was an interesting exercise that highlights
how much there is to discover about God.
We are now moving into the medical teaching. On the
basis of 1 week’s instruction last year – and quite a bit of practice on
outreach – I taught the session on how to take vital signs. I am more
comfortable teaching Shakespeare but there is not much call for that here!
The
baby weighing and growth charting session involved buckets of water
masquerading as babies. It was a fun exercise with students getting quite
involved in the growth of their ‘babies’. (Annabel and Lili are in the photo.)
Last week our speaker was Dr Suneetha, from India,
who has spent the last 26 years treating leprosy and HIV/AIDS patients. He is
an amazingly humble man! His main theme was that there is hope for these
people, and he had amazing stories of the changes in his patients’ lives when
they came to know Jesus.
From April to June, we are all going on outreach to
the Philippines and then to Vanuatu, where we will be doing a combination of
health clinics, health care teaching and evangelism. We are in the process of
organising the details now, so please pray that we don’t forget any vital
details. Neither Christa nor I have done this before!
It might be exaggerating to say that I have
completely adjusted to living with 11 girls who are mostly less than half my
age, but we are learning to cope with each other. God promised me his grace
would be sufficient for me, and it has been, of course. It is not always easy
or comfortable here, but it is a new and exciting adventure.
Love and blessings to you all.
Jan
Email:deanjanl@gmail.com
Postal address:
P.O. Box 8501
Perth B.C.
WA 6849
AUSTRALIA
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