It is our pleasure to share with you the exciting work God has planned for Ryan and I this January and February! He has opened the way for us to spend six weeks in Papua New Guinea ministering to the people there. I will be working with the doctors at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital. Amazingly this will count as part of my medical school education! Kudjip is a 100 bed hospital run by four family practice doctors, a pediatrician, and a surgeon. I will be working with them seeing patients in the hospital and the emergency room, assisting in surgery, and delivering babies in the maternity ward. Much care is also provided at this hospital for patients with HIV and AIDS including a program to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. This is such an opportunity for me to learn more about practicing medicine in the setting of a mission hospital as well as learning about a new culture and people group whom I have never interacted with before.
Ryan will also have many opportunities to work with the in house missionaries and the local population in multiple capacities. He will be helping with IT support, construction projects, and with the Community Based Health Care program, which is involved in training and assisting local populations to improve the health of the community, medically, spiritually and economically. However, most of all, he is excited to get to know the people in the surrounding villages and work with them to establish and promote small business and entrepreneurial development.
While God has opened the door to us for this amazing opportunity, we need your support in order to walk through that door and do the work we feel God has called us to do. There are two crucial ways in which we hope to have your support. First of all, this trip will cost about $8,500 for the two of us including continuing to pay rent on our apartment in Columbus while we are gone. The bulk of that amount is to pay for the plane tickets, which are $5,300. We will be taking many flights before ending up in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea after about 62 hours of travel! Due to the enormous generosity of our friends and family during our wedding and a scholarship from Ohio State University, we have raised $6,100 so far leaving us with $2,400 left to raise. Whether or not you feel you can provide monetary support, your prayers, beginning today, are vitally important. Through prayer, God will not only provide materially for our trip, but He will strengthen us spiritually so that we can truly let His light shine!
Thank you so much for following our adventure through our blog! Keep checking back over the next months for updates and please contact us if you are interesting in supporting us in this journey. Christine