Do Christian nonprofits make a difference?

Sometimes it is difficult being a Christian nonprofit organization. Some supporters would rather that we left our Christianity at home and just cared for people's physical needs. After all, they say, why should we cram our religious beliefs down other people's throats? Why not just give them a hand and let them decide on their own? Organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders do a great job helping people without any religious context... but Hospitals of Hope isn't quite like them.

Other supporters argue that we aren't religious enough. Why, they ask, don't we have more evangelistic campaigns? Why don't we plant churches everywhere we go? Once again, there are several other organizations that do this quite well, such as Gospel for Asia and the Billy Graham Foundation. Hospitals of Hope doesn't fit into this mold either.

Hospitals of Hope tries to combine these two ideologies and "Show Christ's Love By Healing Bodies and Souls" [our mission statement]. We want to holistically care for people's physical and spiritual needs just as Christ did. We cannot separate one from the other. Jesus obviously attended to the spiritual needs of his followers, but he also healed them, fed them and looked after their other physical needs. As Christians, we should do no less. This can be a difficult middle ground to walk upon, but it is where we have been called.

I got started thinking about this topic after my uncle sent me an article titled "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God." In it, he goes on to explain that aid work alone will not change the current problems in Africa. People need to change, and normal aid organizations do not change people. According to the author, Christianity is the only thing that will change Africa. I would have to agree.

Back in Kansas

After an eventful trip, during which we ended up stranded in Chicago for the weekend, Daniel and I have returned to work in Kansas, while Mike continues working at the hospital in Bolivia. (He and his wife, Elizabeth, a Bolivian-trained dentist, will spend Christmas with her parents in Cochabamba.) While in Bolivia, I was blessed to meet many of the people that work at and are served by the hospital. While the political climate in Bolivia has become fairly anti-American recently, the people I met were all welcoming and more than willing to talk to a gringa with somewhat sketchy Spanish.

One of those I met was an indigenous woman named Ginoviva. She is a native of Bolivia, but she seems to be one of the large numbers of Bolivians for whom Spanish is a second language, since she speaks it with a somewhat nasal twang. Her native language is probably Quechua.

Ginoviva came to the hospital with her husband, who has been suffering from a cough. Other doctors they have seen have told them there’s nothing wrong, but he has not gotten better. Our hospital is one of the best in Cochabamba, so they came in the hopes that our doctors could help. Ginoviva and her husband have three children, all under the age of 15, which surprised me, because, from her appearance, I thought she must be in her 50s. Probably poverty and hard work have combined to make her look older than she actually is. Please keep Ginoviva and her family in your prayers.

Another person I had the opportunity to speak with was Nestor Hugo, the pastor who preaches to the people in the hospital waiting room. A Baptist minister, Nestor preaches tirelessly day after day to our patients and their families. (Latin America tends to be much more open to public discussion of faith than the United States.) Nestor was eager to talk to me and get a chance to practice his English.

While we were speaking in broken English and Spanish about everything from our families to his ministry, a woman came up to him asking for prayer. He interrupted our conversation to speak with her for a few minutes and to give her counsel and prayer before her doctor’s appointment. This seems to be a frequent occurrence for him, allowing him to minister to those in great physical and spiritual need.

As we talked, Nestor asked me to pray for his family, for the people of the community, for those he preaches to at the hospital. Before I left, he prayed for me in Spanish, and I prayed for him in English, with the confidence that the God we serve understands no matter what language we speak.

An Eventful Sunday

Well, we've had a busy weekend here in Bolivia. Yesterday the hospital hosted a community picnic and soccer tournament to raise funds for needy children in the community. People from the community made traditional Bolivian dishes, ranging from a type of chicken soup to a dish of chicken, pork, and potatoes cooked in a pot buried in the ground. During the meal, a youth group from the Iglesia Buen Pastor (Good Shepherd Church) presented an evangelistic drama, which was received warmly.

The soccer tournament ran from about 11:30 in the morning until about 4:30 in the afternoon. The Hospitals of Hope team won their first game by forfeit, which took them to the semifinals, where they lost narrowly. I don't know the exact number of people who came, but I would guess that there were a couple hundred.

That in itself would have been enough excitement for one day, but that was actually just the beginning. About 5:30, the guard came to the guest house to tell Mike, a physician assistant specializing in trauma, that an accident victim had just been brought in. For the next several hours, we were at the hospital, where Daniel and I translated and brought supplies while the staff and Mike worked on the patient, who had deep cuts on his face and several fractures. The hospital was already nearly at capacity before this man was brought in, and a few more people were brought into the emergency room over the course of the evening, leaving all of our patient beds full and a couple of patients on beds in the hallway. The hospital has been consistently near or at capacity while we have been here this last week, making us realize how badly our planned addition to the hospital is needed.

Vote for Hospitals of Hope

As many of you know, Hospitals of Hope is setting up a remote patient monitoring system, called Angel Eyes, at our hospital here in Bolivia. With this system, doctors in the United States or anywhere in the world can view vital signs and live video feed from patient rooms at our hospital in Bolivia and offer guidance to our staff here. We are working on making this system easier to access by making it available over web-based phones, which will mean that our doctors in Bolivlia will have the opportunity to receive advice from a wider network of specialists. You can read more about Angel Eyes Mobile on our website.

What we really need from you right now, though, is your vote. We've submitted our project to a USAID challenge for use of mobile technology to improve the lives of those in the developing world. The winners will be determined, in part, by popular, so we need your help in order to gain this important support. So please help us out by voting for Angel Eyes Mobile. This Friday is the last day to vote, so please vote now.

Hola de Bolivia!

Mike, Daniel, and I arrived in Bolivia around midnight Sunday evening. We landed in Santa Cruz, where we stayed that night. About noon yesterday (Monday), we boarded our plane for Cochabamba. Santa Cruz is at an elevation of about 1500 feet, I believe, while Cochabamba is closer to 9,000, so we left wintery weather in Kansas, arrived to sweltering heat in Santa Cruz, and then flew to Cochabamba, where the weather is temperate year-round.

This morning we traveled to Suticollo, a community on the outskirts of Cochabamba. There is a tollbooth along the highway that runs through, where we have set up a small clinic. There isn't much to see at the clinic, but it provides emergency medical care and transport to the hospital for accident victims.

On Sunday, there was a major accident involving a bus, which left couple of people dead and five others severely injured. (You can read a Spanish-language article about the accident in the local newspaper.) Those five are now in our hospital receiving care. A woman I spoke to this morning had heard of the accident and told me that it was good that the victims were brought here, as other nearby clinics are very poor quality. Yesterday we drove by one of those clinics, which is one of the major ones that cares for trauma victims. It was a small, two-story adobe building, that looked like it could have been just another house, were it not for the sign out front proclaiming that it offers medical care.

As I toured the hospital this morning, I met a young woman named Gracia (Grace) who had come to the hospital for the sake of her daughter Melanie. Melanie, who is two years old, is suffering from malnutrition and weighs only about 15 pounds. I would have guessed her age to be closer to one year than to two, based on her size. She will be hospitalized here while she recovers.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Hospitals of Hope blog! We’ve decided to start this blog in order to keep you all updated about the work Hospitals of Hope is doing in the United States and around the world. You can read Daniel’s and my posts here every week or so, and we’d love for you to leave comments or sign up to follow the blog.

On Sunday, the U.S. staff of Hospitals of Hope (Mike, Daniel, and I) will be headed to Bolivia to work at our hospital in Cochabamba. It will only be the second time Mike and Daniel have been to Bolivia this year, due to our commitments here and in Liberia, and it will be my first time there, since I joined the Hospitals of Hope staff in July. While there, Mike will be doing administrative work, and Daniel will be working to set up Angel Eyes, South America’s first remote patient monitoring system. I will be helping them, meeting our Bolivian staff, and learning about how our hospital works with the surrounding community. We’ll plan to post an update or two to the blog while we’re there, so be sure to check back soon.

We’ve also just finished our December newsletter, and we’ll be sending that out in the next couple of days before we leave. If you aren’t on our mailing list, you can visit our website to sign up. If you’d like to read it online, you can view a PDF file of it.