Restoring Sight and Hope!

It was an honor and privilege to host the Cataract Surgery team from Samaritan’s Purse once again.  This one week mission started week’s beforehand with the IDAT team announcing the upcoming opportunity to towns and villages as far as 100 miles away. Hundreds of people responded and walked for days to reach us. Our medical team pre-screened over 1,500 prospective patients knowing the team would be able to do around 400 surgeries.

The vision for IDAT has always been to host teams that can come into Tonj and focus on what God has called them to do without worrying about team safety, transportation, sleeping arrangements, preparing food, safe drinking water, laundry etc. When Samaritan’s Purse first approached us about hosting 20 people alongside our existing team, we knew it would be a stretch but with a bit of juggling we made it happen!

We transformed our maternity delivery suite into an operating theatre, allowing for three surgeons to be operating at once.

The IDAT team’s prescreened patients were checked by the Samaritan’s Purse ophthalmologist and then added to the surgery line. This simple surgery that is readily available in Western countries, is truly a gift here in South Sudan.

Many of the patients walked for days to get this life-changing surgery and have their sight restored.

The team started early and worked non-stop to maximize the number of patients treated. The surgery only takes about 15 minutes and is done using a microscope.

After surgery the patients would spend the night and have their bandages removed the next day.

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” Romans 12:12

Our Hospital waiting area was transformed into a sleeping quarter for the operated patients and their caregivers. Our chaplains were available 24 hours and in the evening showed the Jesus film to the patients.

The following morning the doctors removed the eye patches and gave post-surgery information before releasing the patients to go home.

This is the best part, seeing patients rejoice and praise God for restoring their sight. In just one week 442 cataract surgeries were completed! We are grateful for the prayers and partnerships that enable us to love so many patients and open the eyes of the blind.

2022 Youth Conference!

Calvary Chapel Tonj hosted its 2nd annual youth conference themed ‘You Have Been Called!” More than 600 youth were in attendance from 20 of our village church plants. It was awesome to have our new church building ready to host this event.

It was two days of excitement with teaching from our missionaries, missionary kids, visiting team and local pastors and youth.

The worship was lively, full of dancing, jumping, singing, clapping, trumpet blowing (horn) and joy.

Then it was time to get silly and play some games! Everyone got involved and loved the games!! This was the perfect way to get youth from different churches and areas to know one another. There was so much love and laughter as IDAT staff and missionaries made fools of themselves and youth competed in teams.

Of course, we were there to share the love of God and to hear from Him through His Word.

We had breakout sessions on purity, marriage, Godliness in women and men.

The entire event was bathed in prayer for this next generation to be raised up as Godly leaders in this country.

Through generous partners who helped us fund this conference we were able to provide meals to the attendees and volunteers. During this season of food insecurity, it was a huge blessing to be able to feed so many youth. Thank you to Destinee for organizing this event with Calvary Chapel Tonj pastors and leaders.

The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen as His heritage! Psalm 33:11-12

We are trusting that the seeds planted will grow and produce good fruit in this future generation of leaders and believers.

Testimony!

Back in July’s newsletter we shared a story of Rebekah.  Ps, Mabior prayed for her as she was suffering from an intensely itchy, skin peeling condition for three years before coming to IDAT. It was so intense she was scratching herself with a knife.

We moved her into a home on the compound where she received daily medicine, skin treatments, food and love. Praising God for His leading to reach out and help her.

Summer Team!

We had an incredible summer, and the highlight was hosting a team from Florida and California. One of our goals was to get our CHE Well Drilling Program up and running and to start training a local team of guys to continue the work in the CHE villages.

Jim and Jane Boehm arrived in July for 3 months. Jim worked with Jed and a local team of guys, training them in well drilling.  They completed the first of six wells, which took longer than expected. We chose a site close to town and the IDAT compound and there was no better site than the CC Tonj church land. All the problems they faced gave Jim a great opportunity to thoroughly prepare his team to work through issues that might occur when he’s not there.

Please pray as we continue to train the team. We are in the middle of the rainy season which adds challenges, especially as we start drilling in the CHE villages, getting to those remote areas might be tricky! Pray for favor and wisdom so we can get at least 2 more wells drilled before Jim leaves.

“I have shown you in every way, by laboring like this, that you must support the weak. And remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ” Acts 20:35

Chaplain Training and Outreaches!

Two of the ten member team came specifically to train our hospital chaplains.

I had shared the need, to help our hospital chaplains and train up new chaplains, with Ps. Frank from Catalyst Church and he agreed to come to South Sudan and help. He has served as a chaplain for many years and together with Ps. Cameron, they poured themselves out on our pastors and specifically focused on building them up as chaplains. We now have 20 trained and equipped chaplains to care for the spiritual well-being of our patients, providing 24-hour care for our ward and hospital.

With the team we were able to do three medical outreaches to remote villages. Doctor Kym, along with IDAT Dr. Jono and Clinical Officer Maker, meant we could see several hundred patients at each outreach. With the extra help we set up a chaplain station and prayed for every patient.

With the current food crisis, we decided to take food to the lepers colony, as they are often an overlooked community. As well as giving sacks of food we cooked a meat stew and served it to them with rice. This was greatly appreciated!

We also distributed 66,000 lbs. of food at our 2^nd mass food distribution that fed over 1,000 families in six communities! Please pray for South Sudan where 75% of the population are facing severe food insecurity.

The team did a great job sharing the food out. It was a long day and towards the end a bit of a frenzy as people realized the food was finishing and they might not receive. Pray as we plan to do one more outreach.

We also hosted a 2-day Youth Conference and will update in next month’s newsletter.

Urgent Need!

This little girl really touched my heart. She is suffering so much and in desperate need of surgery. Please pray as you read her story that the Lord touches someone’s heart to help us to help her.

Achot is a beautiful 7-year-old girl from our church who has heart failure due to Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD). In this condition damage occurs to the heart valves due to an autoimmune reaction to throat infection with streptococcal bacteria. RHD is rare in USA because we have readily available antibiotics, but it still occurs here in Africa where access to medical care is poor. As a result of her heart failure, she is struggling to breathe, gets frequent chest infections, and is not gaining weight. We sent the Echo scan images to a missionary cardiac surgeon at Tenwek Mission Hospital in Kenya, who is confident his team can repair the severely damaged mitral and tricuspid heart valves. This would give Achot the ability to live a normal life and raise a family. The surgery carries a 2-3% risk of mortality, but without surgery her life expectancy is very short. The cost of surgery and transport to Kenya is $12,000 and we would absolutely love to see beautiful Achot given a chance to have a normal life! To help with this need please email me.

The bible says:

“Carry each other’s burdens and so you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Galatians 6:2

Pastor Mabior Bona Bol!

Pastor Mabior is the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Tonj. Even though he lived in many other places, he returned to Tonj following a dream he had in 2015. In the dream he saw a large crowd of people, including top officials gathered in Tonj’s Freedom Square. Then he heard a voice saying, “who will teach these people God’s Word.” Mabior stood up and started praying. It was an amazingly powerful prayer for his people and country, crying out to God until the rain poured down. People were asking him “why don’t you become a pastor?” At this point he woke up from the dream and asked God what he should do?

Pastor Mabior was raised Catholic. As a teenager but experienced no change in his life or heart. Later in 2008, as a young adult, he started attending a Pentecostal church while working in Rumbek and became born again. Jesus completely changed his heart. During this time, he was sent for pastoral training and felt called to ministry, but there were a few things in the Pentecostal church that disturbed him.

Mabior moved back to his home town of Tonj in 2017 but found his church choices were limited to the local Catholic church, an Episcopal Church, and an Evangelical church, called Calvary Chapel Tonj. He visited CC Tonj, and immediately loved the style of preaching and worship and knew he found his home church. He started serving first as a volunteer and then was hired as the assistant pastor. In 2019, he became the lead pastor. Last year during the IDAT soccer tournament he was preaching to a great crowd including officials and realized that was the dream he saw in 2015. Pastor Mabior will be ordained as a Calvary Chapel Pastor on December 18th 2022.

Water Well Drilling!

As the CHE program continues to multiply and bring transformation to the villages of Tonj, the primary obstacle to health that community leaders share with us is their lack of clean drinking water. In South Sudan, the average distance a family lives from safe drinking water is 5 km, and for many of our CHE communities it is much further.

So this year we are excited to be piloting a water well drilling program! Jim from USA and Jed Kuj completed their training in July, and are now training our team here. Despite the challenges of old equipment, flooding, and limited experience, the team have just reached 25m deep on their first water well. If this pilot goes well, we hope to purchase a new drill rig at the end of the year.

Bringing Hope through Jesus!

I’m heading back to Tonj this month with Jed, where In Deed and Truth are working so hard to provide food to the villages we are serving as a mission. We estimate 4,000 families need urgent assistance with food in our immediate area. We are also witnessing more and more pregnant and lactating mothers and children in our hospital with acute malnutrition. Our area is classed as a level 4 Emergency.

One elderly woman named Rebekah, who was suffering from a skin disease, came to us desperate and begging for food. Pastor Mabior was able to pray with her and encourage her and our team gave her medical treatment and food in the Name of Jesus. She wept and thanked us and we told her, “God loves you Rebekah, He sees you and we believe He brought you to us.”

As we endeavor to love our neighbor in ‘Deed’ and ‘Truth’. We have purchased 10 tons of food so far and distributed this to the most vulnerable in CHE villages around Tonj. We can feed a family of 10-12 people for a cost of $50 for one month. If we can do this in July and August it will sustain them until they can harvest for themselves in September. IDAT is committed to supporting this need and you can help us provide food through donations to our ‘Food Crisis’ fund. http://bit.ly/idatfoodcrisis.

CHE Testimonies!

I love our Community Health Evangelism Program. It equips, empowers, educates and evangelizes!!

Our CHE program is flourishing, with our dedicated Community Health Evangelists teaching 3,000 health and spiritual lessons to families around Tonj over the past month, resulting in 400 people making decisions to follow Christ. We continue to be encouraged by the constant stream of testimonies of transformation, healing and salvation taking place.

These two ladies, Rosa and Josephina, in our new CHE village of Pala had taken each other to court over a dispute and hadn’t spoken to each for 5 months. However, when they heard the story of the prodigal son, taught by Marko Wutchok our CHE program manager, they both decided there and then to forgive each other and drop the court case to the great joy of the whole community!

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”
 2 Corinthians 5:18-19

Akech Ajual and Abuk Aleu in Abui CHE center had been in a dispute for 7 years, and hadn’t talked or greeted each other in this time despite living in the same village. During the Abui CHE committee graduation, Akech was inspired to seek reconciliation with Abuk. They were able to forgive each other and pray together with our team, and are now living in peace, greeting each other, and even eating meals together!

We are now in 38 villages, 29 are actively using CHE and 9 are in training! We have over 1,500 CHE volunteers serving these villages. They work really hard making an average of 2,500 home visits a month! We have over 80 bible listening groups using a solar audio bible in their native tongue.

From those groups and sharing we had 1,423 decisions to follow Christ in the past three months. It is so exciting to be serving Him in this way! Thank you for your prayers!