2011 in Review

As 2011 comes to an end, it is time for my annual review post.

Health Ministries
The aim of the Health Ministry is to assist on the plantation of new churches in the rural and river areas and the strengthening of existing churches in those areas.

Clinics Summary

• There were 18 trips
• A total of 36 communities were visited and served as host for the clinics and nightly evangelistic services
• People from an additional 151 communities came to clinics
• A total 187 communities impacted!
• 5 medical doctors, 5 dentists, 6 nurses, 2 nutritionists, and 1 physiotherapist participated on various trips
• The doctors saw a total of 393 patients, including 27 small surgical procedures, while the nurses helped 1,904 people.
• The dentists brought back the smile on 728 faces
• The nutritionists taught 438 people how to eat healthier and the physiotherapist helped 69 people.
• The health professionals also conducted 46 talks on the host communities covering things like women’s health, basic hygiene, disease prevention, hypertension, diabetes, dental hygiene, etc.

Evangelistic Summary

• On some evenings we shows evangelistic movies, some evenings the visiting volunteer health professionals also give their testimonies and the supervising pastor gives evangelistic message.
• During the day we seek to do children activities (ie. games, puppets, bible stories) , as their school schedules allows, and, when possible, during the evening services.
• The health professionals make use of the opportunities to share their faith that crop up during the consultations.
• A total of 108 adults and 101 children made a decision for Christ during the trips!

Water Filter Ministries
Our current goal is complete the supervision all of the 10,000+ filters installed in the Amazon. To achieve this we are training the local church workers and their supervising pastors to carry all the filter supervision and maintenance activities on their own.

We trained most of the health missionaries in the Santarém Base, divided into teams of two. Each team has adopted an missionary area/region, is working alongside the supervising pastor, ’till all the filters in the region are supervised and active and all local workers trained on maintenance and proper report preparation.

Training Summary (from May to Nov 2011)

• Almost all of the health missionaries went through a hands-on training on proper filter supervision and maintenance and also on proper report preparation
• 26 hands-on training were conducted on the communities undergoing supervision. Members of our team guides the workers and their supervising pastor through maintenance and supervision procedure several times. 35 workers/supervisors went through this process at least once.
• Each rural/river region have conferences at various times of the year, gathering nearly all the local workers for that region in a single local. We conducted a one to two hour session on vision of the filter and proper report preparation on three such conferences. A total of 60 workers attended a session.

Supervision Summary (from May to Nov 2011)

• 26 communities were visited
• A total of 764 were left in good working condition
• A total of 199 were found abandoned by the host family. We always seek to get the family to give the filter another try, failing that, we look for a new host family on the same or nearby community. Many of these have already be reactivated, but I don’t have the report to confirm how many.
• A total of 27 were broken beyond repair, mostly by the flood. Whenever possible we seek to reassign one of the abandoned filters above to these host families.
• A total of 990 filters of the 9,700+ filters in Base of Santarém were visited during May ‘till November 2011

Cell Ministries
This year we multiplied our cell area into three smaller areas. We passed two areas to two capable leaders and stayed with a smaller area of only twelve and the challenge of raising a capable leader to take care of them.

We are going to be even more involved with the river ministries in the coming year and it would be even more difficult to maintain a high level of involvement with the city ministries at the same time.

Rescue Japan
We spent seven weeks in Japan helping with the tsunami clean-up effort and encouraging the PAZ Churches there. Both aspects of the trip was a success.

• During the week the team worked on the clean-up effort: Four weeks in the region of Iwake, inside the radiation zone from Fukushima, helping with the Global Mission’s effort there; and one week in the region of Sandai, helping with the Samaritan’s Purse’s effort there.
• One week we stayed in Kawasaki and did minor repairs, remodeling, painting, etc on the PAZ church building there.
• During the weekends we visited the five PAZ churches, encouraging, sharing, giving personal testimonies, doing outreaches, passing the MDA vision.
• The pastors there were encouraged with the fact they are not alone but are part of greater family that will be increasingly more involved in the work there. This was only the first of many teams. The next one is already in the works.
• We left a handful of new Christians, the fruit of the outreaches, in a brand new and growing cell group.
• We touched many lives as we listened to their stories and showed God’s love through our service.

Thank you, as none of this would have been possible without your faithful prayer and support.