Community Health Day

This has been a long but amazing day. We have an amazing short-term (3 week) missionary couple with us from the UK and one of them (Fran) is a dentist. Today, we ran two dental clinics where Fran and Ann did basic community health teaching and Fran did alot of dental exams and quite a bit of tooth pulling. We finally had to stop out in one village area as we were exhausted and the sun was going down (no electricity) and there were still people lined up to see her. The needs are tremendous but the workers few....

In the morning while they were doing the dental clinic in T-3, I spent time in class with our new group of church planters (picture above). They have been in class this week at T-3 learning about church planting. Today they were each doing a practical on how to teach a class and do inductive Bible Study. We discussed many things and I have a couple of classes to reach in the morning. Three of them start with our ECC program on September 1, moving into Gaza province, Inhambane province, and one in Maputo province. The remaining four will start with ECC on January 1, covering Machava, Massinga in Inhambane, Nampula, and Maputo. The training is quite extensive and we will be following up closely with them over the coming months. We really look forward to seeing what God will do with the lovely young men (and woman) as they take the Gospel out to their country.

The dental clinic was a group effort. A daughter of a missionary friends of ours helped us with translation and recording of dental information while Ann assisted the dentist. I held babies and entertained kids so their parents could be examined, talked with those waiting, and did alot of praying. We prayed with each patient before each examination and during each procedure, where procedures were required. Fran did an amazing job and her love for the Mozambican people was readily apparent and she was extremely well received. Fran taught one of our Pastors (Ricardo) how to teach about proper brushing and he took over that assignment and we all had great fun with the big teeth and brush that you see on the bench. We handed out lots of tooth brushes, tooth paste, and other dental supplies to help out.

Because of the extreme demand, we will do another clinic this weekend, but that will be about all. Fran will have pretty much exhausted her supplies by then and she brought quite a bit. It has been a great first experience at doing some clinic work. We will also work with our one operating pre-school next week as one of the best things Fran is doing is teaching good basic tooth care - brushing twice a day, for example. The expectation here is that your teeth go bad and you get them pulled. The expectation that if you take care of them, they can last a life-time, is something new to challenge people with.

Thank you for standing with us as we work together to reach the nations for Christ.

"But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?" 1 John 3:17