Sowers4Pastors doesn’t have the opportunity to host a lot of medical teams. When they do, it is a big honkin’ deal! Over the past few years, it has sometimes been necessary to pay Honduran doctors and dentists to provide the health checks for the children. While that has been fine, S4P is very happy to have a medical team of Americans on the ground right now – volunteering their time to provide checkups and eye exams to the kids in sponsorship programs, as well as others in those same communities.
If you’ve been paying attention, you will recall that Allen and Trish asked for prayer regarding getting all of the necessary medicines through customs. They also reported that they had found a lawyer who was very knowledgeable in that area to help them through the process. S4P is delighted to announce that the team made it through customs with all of their supplies. The ministry was only required to pay a tiny processing fee. The team members arrived in two parts, on two different days, and getting through customs was a very long and drawn out process, requiring hours on each of the days. But they did it! At the end of each day, team members and supplies were allowed to enter and everything is being put to good use.
What we might call “routine checkups and eye exams” aren’t routine everywhere in the world. The team has now returned to the US, and the work of reviewing the collected information and find resources to help, begins. In the past, medical checkups have found things that would not have gone untreated in the States. Things like limbs that were broken and never set. That’s something that S4P has the capacity to help with. Even when a case requires surgery, they are often able to get the kids the treatment they need. The checkups are vital because the people at S4P don’t see each child frequently. The ministry will come out of this week with spreadsheets full of information that they can use to improve the health of individual children and, thus, the community as a whole.
Bringing in a medical team and the people who are there to provide clerical support requires a bit of finesse from S4P staff members. It’s important to advertise and spread the word without advertising so much that too many people show up! The goal is to have a steady stream of people throughout the day rather than having a crowd waiting for hours and hours in the morning and then no one in the afternoon.
Sowers4Pastors looks at every visiting team as ambassadors. While a lot of organizations make money from hosting teams, S4P doesn’t do that. They try to cover the real expenses incurred from hosting teams, but that’s it. They are, of course, not able to cover the costs for teams that visit, but they don’t want people to feel they can’t come because it’s too expensive. Trish explained, “We’re wanting people to come and do the things they are skilled in doing. We also rely on teams to spread the word and act as ambassadors when they go home.”
In fact, Trish went on to say, “The woman leading the current medical team started out as a Manna sponsor. She’s a nurse practitioner who came down to visit with a Manna team. When she went home, she decided to try her hand at bringing down medical teams, and she recruits people for these teams who had never previously heard of Sowers4Pastors.” Now THAT is an ambassador!
Teams are not viewed as a source of financial support for the ministry when they come. The hope and prayer is always that they will go home and tell people about the work Sower4Pastors is doing and that they will be a blessing to people in Honduras now and in the future.
- posted by Christi
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