Monday, October 29, 2012


Spending a year in Zambia as a missionary associate is an exciting next step in my missionary journey.  Here is my brief testimony of why I am where I am today.  While growing up in the church, meeting missionaries and hearing their stories was one of my favorite times.  I felt my own calling to be a missionary as a twelve year old child.  What that looks like has been shaped along the years by different people and experiences.  My first missions trip was a high school AIM trip to Venezuela.  It helped deepen my desire.  A high school science teacher encouraged my pursing of a career in medicine as a senior.  From then on my path has been to work overseas in medical missions.  I received my undergraduate degree at Evangel University where my academic and spiritual life matured.  In medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin, I was able to go to Zambia as a fourth year medical student and complete a month rotation with another student and an experienced medical missionary nurse practioner.  Though previously I had felt a call to India, during that trip a love of the African people was born that has only grown over the years.  I spent my pediatric residency in Cleveland, Ohio where I went to Kenya for a month rotation.  God has provided a perfect job at Southwestern Medical Clinic in Michigan with a Christian, mission-minded practice.  I have been able to go to Sudan for a month.  I also went to India with Evangel premed and nursing students as a preceptor.  There it was confirmed to me that I wanted to go with AGWM.  Last May I returned for one month to Zambia and worked with the same missionaries from my medical school trip.  Through many big and small ways God showed me Zambia is the right country for me to serve.  

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Spent the weekend in the Cleveland area.  Met up with so many friends from Christian Heritage A/G.  What a privilege to share the dream God has given me.  The sense of the immensity of what He is doing, what I have a small part in, hit me in a powerful way as I was waiting to share for a few minutes in morning service.  How God can take a little girl from New Berlin, Wisconsin and send her as a doctor to Lusaka, Zambia is amazing.  Nothing I've done makes me worthy to be in such a position; it's all by His grace.  Sharing Sunday night felt so natural.  He might make a preacher out of me yet, though Archie would probably say I didn't yell enough yet.  The time of prayer was incredible.  So many voices lifted up to God for the people I am learning to love deeply.  I wish I could record the prayers so many have prayed over me so far.  So many Spirit-led words of wisdom and encouragement.  Thank you is not enough.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Here's a few pictures to introduce some of the people and projects I will be working with while in Zambia.  This picture is of Lovemore, the head of the national community health evangelism program (CHE).  He is praying with the sweetest mother and daughter I met on my trip last year.  The little girl is seven years old and has spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  Despite these crippling diseases in such a resource poor area, she and her mom had wonderful smiles that matched their joyful attitudes.  I met them at a health screening.  I had hoped to connect her to a missions hospital in the capital that had a neurosurgeon, but unfortunately, she passed away before making it down there.  This picture embodies what the CHE program is.  Christians bringing the love and hope of Christ in many different facets.

This is a group of teenagers and children from a church where we taught a Holy Spirit seminar over a weekend.  The pastors often have little opportunity for formal Bible training so bringing this helps give them more Biblical training and materials along with strengthening the congregation.  It is so wonderful to partner with the local, national pastors.  The young woman on my right wants to become an accountant.

These are the children being weighed, measured for height and mid upper arm circumference in a village 6 hours north of the capital.  These numbers help predict or tell us if a child is malnurished or in danger of becoming malnurished.  During the health screening, I wrote prescriptions for medications for simple problems like ringworm or eczema and taught the community health workers things about "sick" and "not sick" children.  I learned about what mumps looks like in person.  Mumps is something doctors in America only read about in books thanks to our great vaccination programs.  Here it is still a very real problem, along with measles and chicken pox and neonatal tetanus.