Christmas Newsletter 2007
It was the end of August when Peter and I decided to leave Beverley behind and head for Romania again. Instead of the usual beautiful bike ride holiday we found we were watching bulldozers and tipper lorries preparing a piece of land to build a new school for the handicapped children in the Siret community. It was quite a shock as we knew nothing about this, but the mayor had decided to give a piece of land in the village to our Romanian branch for this purpose and a group of Dutch workers have volunteered to come and build it next summer. There are no facilities at all for disabled children’s education in Siret and I am very hopeful that this building will be a real blessing. Our house building plans have made some progress and Brindusa and Titi, our leaders, now have the architect’s plans and are getting all the necessary permissions to start. There is an air of expectancy in the Rehab unit and whispers of more weddings next year. They want to follow in Valentin’s footsteps and have houses of their own and babies too! I think Brindusa and Titi will have a very busy year ahead and I expect we shall have a very expensive one! However many of our Siret volunteers from the past are very brilliant at fund raising and one example is a recent bangers and mash lunch which raised £1550 and a very good time was had by all! I do hope you will all join in to help us raise enough money to build this terrace on our land next spring. Elena and Vasile will be next to marry and they are relying on your help! Benoni, Irina and Marian Paun are also waiting.
At the end of our stay we spent two days in Moldova visiting the Ministry of Health and spending time with the ORA charity who we have arranged to link with to distribute our gifts. It was a fruitful visit and we were able to go ahead with a container for the ORA group which had some very useful medicines and equipment for the Criuleni hospital which we had visited the previous year. Titi was very happy that his new truck was not stuck on the border and he was able to deliver this, our first load, so easily. We hope that this will be the first of many as this country is very poor and needs much help for its people. We are thankful to Veronica, the ORA leader, for her successful work to clear customs so efficiently.
In the middle of October we joined a group of FREED volunteers for our first visit to Nandum in northern Ghana. Our container had successfully made it out of the Tema Port and been delivered over a thousand kilometers of awful roads. Our group had doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, a microbiologist, and even a journalist and a football coach. Our container had been emptied into the eye ward which was not in use as they only had occasional visits from the ophthalmologist. The medicines were all in the pharmacy and some of the equipment had made it into the theatre and wards but there was much distributing and sorting to be done.
All the bikes had gone and were obviously in use. Hardly anybody had a car. We met the three doctors that worked in the hospital, two were from Ghana and one was a Bulgarian Neurosurgeon who specialised in operating on the cervical spines of the many women who damaged their necks when carrying heavy loads on their heads. He had little modern equipment and we were amazed that he was able to perform such difficult operations with the equipment he had. His work is very needed in Ghana. The Nandum region had no dentists and we were able to help the dentists from our group to set up a room for the extraction of bad teeth. They managed to train some nurses to do emergency extractions and when they advertised for patients on the local radio the queue went the full length of the corridor. The teachers were able to set up a library in the local school and the football coach was the most popular - we had a tournament at the end of the week and the boys, aged 9 and 10 years, all had new football kit on and had a real football to play with. Theirs was usually a home made one made by stuffing a plastic water carton. More football kit has been requested. Can anybody help? Most of the schools had nothing but a blackboard. The class sizes were between 40 and 80 and three children share a desk for two. We had some hexagonal school tables and chairs in the container supplies and they were very happily received by the kindergarten school in the hospital grounds. They had only benches and not many of them.
Wherever we went the children were begging for our empty water bottles so that they could carry some water with them to school. There were no school meals and many schools cannot even provide water. The harvest had not been good and many families did not have enough food. It was a joy to be in a very full church of people celebrating mass and giving thanks to God for what little they had. The praises will have reached loudly up to heaven. Next to the church is a vocational school training young apprentices. We sent Margaret, one of our trustees, down to this school to deliver a knitting machine from the container. The Nun burst into tears when she saw it and said it was an answer to prayer and all the pupils started to dance and sing for Margaret who was very overwhelmed. We are very thankful to have found another good home for these machines and to find that they are so needed. The next container will go to Lawra about 20 miles south of Nandum as soon as we can afford it!
You will be pleased to hear that containers now seem to be getting cleared through customs in Kabul very much more speedily. One is now in Karachi Port and we hope it will reach Kabul by Christmas. The medicines are still very much needed and our Mother and Child Clinic is very much in demand. Crowd control is our biggest problem! Dr Farid, our Afghan leader reports that he has managed to start two mobile clinics and this year our medicines have really been spread around Afghanistan to where the need is greatest. The fighting continues and almost every day a roadside bomb attack claims more lives. Mines are still a problem and we join with the majority of Afghans to pray that the fighting will soon be at an end.
Some good news may be coming out of Pakistan. Two years ago we sent two containers of relief aid for the earthquake disaster areas of the North West Frontier Province and they have now been in Port Qasim, Karachi for two years. Try as we may we have so far been unable to move them out but just as President Musharaf declared a state of emergency in the country we received a telephone call to say that they could be moved. This is more than a month ago now and we have some hope that by Christmas they will be moving and distribution can begin. We hope and pray that many of the clothes and bedding, tents, bandages and cooking equipment will still be useful but maybe half of the medicines will now be expired. We are told that these things are desperately needed as many of the victims have still not been rehoused.
I want to thank all of our donors for their gifts over this last year. They are all very welcome. I also thank our many volunteers both here in the UK and abroad because without you Jacob’s Well would be just a dream. Finally I want to thank the Lord for his constant daily care of us all and as we celebrate his birth we must remember to thank God for his perfect gift to us this Christmas. May the Lord be with you all.
Beryl Beynon, Medical Director
Baby David with his parents
The Women Carrying Building Blocks