Donor gifts to the Mandevu Orphan Care Center in Zambia help feed, clothe, and educate these children. 

we can be of the funds entrusted to us by donors. But, we still have more potential and many plans to do an even better job going forward. With your continued prayers and support, and God’s will, we look forward to serving even more of those most in need in Christ’s name.

     Over the 175–year history of Presbyterian international mission, we as a church have established capacity for sharing the gospel in the form of churches, schools, hospitals, health clinics, and a host of other institutions and programs. It is impossible to count how many people have been touched by God’s saving grace, nurturing Word, and healing love.
     When the Medical Benevolence Foundation came into existence 46 years ago, we inherited a share in the many hospitals, health clinics, programs, and ministries the PC(USA) added to the medical mission work of our international church partners. In Christ’s name, all of these things in which we now share serve the medical needs of hurting people around the world.
     One of the greatest challenges facing our partners’ efforts to be faithful and sustainable, is the question of how to give care to people with great and immediate needs but no resources. All of these institutions give charity care, which is more than reason would say they could afford. God gives us the privilege of helping our partners make sure that:

• every patient is treated with dignity and skill;

• no one is turned away; and that

• those served will experience both a healing medical touch and a healing spiritual touch of grace and hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

     To our partners’ doors, and therefore by extension to our doors, comes a vast array of people with widely differing health challenges—a thousand times a thousand stories of crisis seeking hope. Please read in this newsletter some of the stories of real people who have been helped through Charity Care ministries. Know that for each story told there are a thousand every day you will never hear. Thanks to God’s grace, thanks to our partners’ energetically faithful and often self-sacrificial ministries, and thanks to your generous contributions to Charity Care, an amazing number of these stories have unexpectedly happy endings.

     Earlier this year, after Kimbila’s baby was delivered by C-section at Good Shepherd Hospital in DR Congo, she began to run a high temperature with extreme weakness. In Africa, patients depend on families to bring them food. The hospital discovered that Kimbila’s husband had abandoned her and she had eaten almost nothing since the delivery. Gifts from donors made it possible to feed Kimbila and restore her and her baby back to health.
     That’s just one small picture of what your gifts make possible in the PC(USA) partner hospitals and clinics around the world. Below is a sampling of how support for charity care is bringing health and hope in developing countries.

Kenya. The Orthopedic Rehabilitation Center at Kikuyu Hospital provides treatment for children in an area with high numbers of congenital problems and infections of the bone. One child with club feet was no longer forced to walk on the tops of his feet.

DR Congo. During an 18-month period, community health workers from IMCK/Good Shepherd Hospital immunized three thousand children and provided prenatal care to hundreds of women.

Zambia. Orphan Care Centers set up by the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian offer food, clothing, and education to the thousands of children orphaned by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In a three-month visit to the United States, Bernard Kabibu, administrator of IMCK in DR Congo, and Dr. Leon Mubikayi spoke to congregations in sixteen states about their work in Africa.
     To enhance their presentation, Kabibu and Mubikayi prepared a 30-minute media piece that highlighted the services of IMCK’s medical work and facts about the medical needs of the population in Congo: the many risks and deaths of pregnancy, the high death rate of children in their first year, the cycles of hunger and poverty. The presentation graphically portrayed the plight of women--how they walk for hours to get water, and how they care for children who die from lack of nutrition and disease. Their message was simple: help us sustain this medical facility in order to work on these problems and train the providers.
     Charlotte Rule White, daughter of Dr. Bill Rule who was one of the founders of IMCK, accompanied Mubikayi and Kabibu on part of their tour. She says that after one of the presentations, someone obviously

overwhelmed with the enormous challenge asked Mr. Kabibu, “Where is your hope?!” He answered simply, “We must throw ourselves on God for hope.”
     Hope comes as God moves faithful donors to support this difficult work.

     Lately, most of us have had that sinking feeling about a bank account that’s shrinking or stocks that aren’t as secure as we thought. Even so, probably no one reading this newsletter has been homeless and living on the streets. But, even a homeless man on the streets of Chicago has more resources than some of the truly “dirt poor” of the world.
     Bill Simmons, former PC(USA) missionary to Africa, tells about the poverty he witnessed in Sudan, where men and boys are so desperate for a piece of clothing that they force the clothes off women and girls and then wear the clothes. “People are poor there in ways Americans cannot imagine,” he says.
     For that reason, hospitals and clinics have very little patient income to purchase medicines and supplies, and they depend on donor gifts to survive.
     Bill remembers, “We watched people die who could have easily been saved if the right medicines had been available.”.
     Thanks to the faithful donors who are not willing to let people die for lack of care--no matter where they live.

Washday in Nicaragua  

• In Kalamazoo, a young woman named Dana Beck receives shares of Upjohn stock from her uncle, the treasurer of Upjohn.

• Years later, still unmarried, she retires to Dunedin, Florida, and marries Archie Fancher. She bequeaths her stock shares to First Presbyterian Church for the “support of missions, and for no other purpose.”

• In Baltimore, two young women (Peggy and Ruth) meet at Johns Hopkins University where they are both nursing students.

• Years later, Peggy becomes director of Wanless Nursing School at Miraj Medical Center in India. Ruth (Barnard) dreams of a professional school of nursing in Haiti. She begins to work towards that goal with the director of Hospital Ste. Croix in Leogane.

• The Medical Benevolence Foundation secures a grant from ASHA for the first building of the nursing school and begins to seek matching funds.

• In Dunedin, Florida, the Dana Beck Fancher Missions committee at First Presbyterian Church meets to discuss the distribution of $50,000 in the fund. Bob Harvie, now married to Peggy, shows her the latest edition of MBF’s Mission Connection newsletter with the Haiti School of Nursing project featured on the front page. He brings it to the committee.

• The committee recommends the session vote to give the entire $50,000 to Haiti School of Nursing, and later an additional $50,000 for matching ASHA grants. The session votes “yes.” Haiti FSIL School of Nursing will be built!