India NOW - Week #1 Report

Several Advent HOPE members are in India as we speak: Grace, Keila, Rohini, Jason, Nancy, Lois, Susy, and Sunny. Here are some of the highlights thus far:

Day #1 (10/30) - Leave for LAX. Meet other missionaries from West Coast USA. East Coast missionaries flew out of Chicago to Germany to India. We flew from LAX to Hong Kong to India.

Day #2 (10/31) - In the air. 14.5 hour flight to Hong Kong. I fell asleep 4 different times and they served us 4 meals. I had to skip some of the food. The one positive is that because we crossed the international dateline, halloween was only 1.5 hours long!! Amen!

Day #3 (11/1) - Arrive in Hong Kong, China then New Delhi, India where we meet up with the East Coast missionaries. A mixture of jet-lag and excitement keep us awake.

Day #4 (11/2) - Arrive in Rajamundry, our homebase. We have orientation and go shopping for Indian clothing.

Days #5-7 - All 14 teams head out to the villages and do visitations. The drive to the villages from our hotel is approx 1-3 hours depending on which village you are heading to. Our team visited 2 villages each day on Friday, Sabbath, and Sunday, encouraging them to come to the evangelistic meetings that would begin Sunday night.

Days #7 - 11 - Starting on Monday (1 week following our departure from LAX), we set up our first clinic. Clinics are either in a tent, outside, abandon building, or the village school house (that has been vacated with teacher permission for our use). Because of the distance to the villages, clinics start at 11am and go til 4-5pm. We are seeing about 130 - 175 patients each day. With 7 medical teams, we saw over 1400 patients last Thursday. The villagers love it, and most of them are not in horrible health, but just want to be examined by doctors from USA. Here is a list of the most common complaints and how we are treating them (on top of healthy lifestyle education):

1. Generalized Pain - Tylenol (or NSAIDs)
2. Weakness - Multivitamin (many feel cured after the first dose!!)
3. Anorexia/worms - Antiparisitic and cyproheptadine (appetite stimulator)
4. Fever (2/2 Chicken Gunia Infection) - Anti-pyretics
5. GERD, abd pain - PPI's and pillow angle elevation
6. Anemia - Iron supplementation
7. UTI - Abx
8. Cold - Supportative

We end our clinics with a village health talk on NEWSTART type principles and teach Christian songs to the village children. It is an exhausting day, but very rewarding!

At 7pm, our evangelistic meetings are well attended. An entire village voted to join our church right before we arrived to visit them!! There have been over 4,000 baptisms since we have arrived, and more are expected before we leave. Please pray for us, here are some of the obstacles:

1. Rain, Rain, Rain
2. Catholic priests offering 1,000 rupees ($25) for people not to attend our meetings
3. Baptist ministers offering clothes to keep people from attending
4. The culture of the area is saturated with Hinduism and traces of it remain as people join the church.

Well I hope you enjoyed this report. It is only a drop in the bucket of what has been happening thus far. Please keep us in prayer as we seek to uplift Jesus and the Bible to this area starving for a better option in life!!

Jason