Medical Mission

Praise the Lord for a safe and profitable trip! I just returned from the medical mission trip to the Philippine island of Palawan, and it was an incredibly enjoyable and exciting experience. I will try to give you at least a brief survey.

We (Dr. Ina Bunyi and I) left Manila early on Friday morning. We landed in Puerta Princessa, the capital of Palawan, had lunch, then rode about 4 hours to the town of Brooke's Point. A former classmate of Dr. Ina's has a clinic so she had a cardiac patient that she wanted Dr. Ina to see (since she is a pediatric cardiologist). That entailed a trip to the provincial hospital where Dr. Ina did an echocardiogram using the ultrasound machine usually used for assessing abdomens and pregnant women.

The next morning we were up quite early and set off about 6:30 for our trip up the mountain. The church in Brooke's Point has a number of outreaches/church plants, one of which is in Tatandayan. It was about a two hour hike up to this village. Once there we had a church service and then had a medical clinic with the help of some of the believers from the church in Brooke's Point. We saw about 39 patients. After enjoying food with the believers there (including fresh coconut milk), we headed back down to the mountain. When we reached the van, we loaded up and headed to the site of another outreach. There we saw 65 patients while the gospel was preached to those assembled. After that it was time to head to the church for choir practice for Sunday. We were able to hep out both by singing in the choir and accompanying on the piano.

Sunday was the start of a week long missions conference at the church. In Sunday school, one of the men in the church gave a presentation about the unreached tribes in Palawan with many sobering statistics. I was surprised to discover how "primitive" many of these villages still are. Then the Sunday school kids came in dressed in the attire of the tribes -- quite a special sight.
Dr. Ina and I were able to share our testimonies as well. We continued to minister through music in the morning service.

The afternoon service was at 2:30pm and included the ordination of the church leaders at Tatandayan, the village we had visited the day before. It was a real blessing to see these mountain people take the first step toward having an indigenous church. After the service we saw about 50 more patients from the various outreaches that had attended the service.

Today we went to the market in Brooke's Point, then boarded the van for the trip back to Puerto Princesa. It was an incredibly fast and packed trip, but the Lord blessed with much strength and wisdom.

Now that I'm back in Manila (feeling as though I was visiting a completely different country), I will be busy this week in preparing the music for the sacred concert this Friday. Please pray that the Lord will bring all the details together to make this concert a blessing to those who attend, and that the music will be able to be used in churches throughout the Philippines.