Latest Happenings

After a lovely more relaxing March with our annual team fellowship, the students on their semester break and Easter break; the new semester is here and April is coming hard and fast. Here are a few of the things keeping us busy in pictures...

We have enjoyed having Wendell (Opa) Geary here for a month. 

We are enjoying (and very busy with!) Medical Missions Course XI. In this picture I am hanging out with the nurse I am mentoring. More coming in another blog post.

Mondays and Tuesdays I am busy in the skills lab teaching 2nd year students pediatric and maternity skills. This semester I will be also spending time in the skills lab with the 1st year students as they learn the very basics like wound care and taking vital signs.

Practicing pediatric chest physiotherapy. It isn't all seriousness :)

Freshmen learning the basics about wound care

Yesterday we spent many hours on how to help a mom give birth and initial baby care

Obviously not very realistic but it helps them think through and visualize the process plus do a little role play on how the will talk with their patients and families. Favorite role on this day is always the birthing mom with her moaning and groaning and excitement at meeting her new baby :)

One of the more fun skills labs we get to do is infant massage. We don't have enough infant mannequins so the students get to practice on each other! I just wish it would be culturally appropriate for me to volunteer to be the patient :)

Seed of Hope

Recently we had one of our couples return from school in Java. When they first came to Bethesda as young people, Mr. Lidaniel served in our chaplain department and Dr. Hanny served as a dentist. They met here and fell in love :) Then they joined MedGo which helped pay for their further education with the help of financial support of faithful donors. While they were away at school they also had a baby. Dr. Hanny returned to school for a Master's Degree in Oral Health and Mr. Lidaniel got further education in caring for children with special needs. This combined with his training as a chaplain perfectly gifts him to help care for some patients and families we have struggled to help. Here in Indonesia having a child with special needs is very difficult as there are few programs or helps in place.

When Mr. Lidaniel returned we were not sure exactly how God would open the doors and fund the program he hoped to start. But he found a place to call home for now in our old mission school (he is sharing the space with one of our missionary couples) and funding was found from a number of sources. He got to work ordering the supplies he needed and getting the word out. Patients were referred by our general doctors, our pediatrician, teachers in the area, our village health program and some just kind of showed up through God's provision. He already has 20 patients and I imagine that will continue to grow. He has even made trips to some of our remote villages where obviously it would be hard for families to make the trip here. Some of these families tell stories of their children having challenges since birth but many started experiencing their challenges after a severe infection like TB meningitis (when tuberculosis infects the lining of the brain).

So last week we celebrated the opening of his space - he calls it Seed of Hope. We dedicated and blessed it together knowing that it will bring hope, help, and comfort to many families who desperately it. Here are a few pictures from the dedication time...

Lots of equipment to help kids with motor development that is also fun

Kids and adults had fun exploring it 

This big ball was especially fun for one of our doctor's kids

After some play time we gathered to hear more about the planned ministry

There was a blessing by one of the chaplains

Pictured are just a few of the kids the program hopes to help

Please be praying for Mr. Lidaniel as he starts this program that he will be able to reach those in need. Pray also there will be no problems causes by sharing the space with our missionary couple. 

Nursing School Accreditation

It is time for me to play catch-up on the blog. There has been lots going on that I haven't gotten around to posting about. Sorry about that! So here is the first post of several...

I have been talking about it for awhile and asking you to pray about it for a long while too. Both our hospital and nursing school were due this year for accreditation. The process here (and it is similar in the US) involves preparation of many documents that are then submitted to the accreditation team and reviewed by them before a site visit. The site visit for the nursing school happened on February 5th (which also happens to be my sister Kristin's birthday!) but there many many hours of work and late nights before that, starting with the deadline to submit the documents several months ago and then again in the final days before the site visit. Here are a couple of pictures of many meetings held in the days prior. You can see the stacks of documents being prepared and finally shaping up to look quite nice in color coded files in our conference room ready to be shown to the assessors during the site visit.

The day of the site visit dressing up in your official Nursing School uniform was required. It is all polyester with long sleeves so it doesn't come out of my closet very often :) The school also got dressed up with a nice banner welcoming the assessors, some new paint, and trees trimmed. 

The scheduled visit is suppose to last 3 days including travel time but our assessors were hoping for a quicker trip so we did it all in one day with travel the day before and after. That meant an early start and a late finish. It was after 9 pm before we were done and they were stressful hours so everyone was quite worn down by the day's end. Following introductions (and barely waiting for those to finish) the assessors went for our jugular which is our lack of master's prepared teachers. Those who actually have a master's in nursing is one - me. We have one in school and plans for at least two others to go back if they can pass the entrance exams. We also have several with master's degrees in health or related field but technically not enough and I don't even really count as a foreigner. It felt like that put us on the defense from the beginning and caused people to be more nervous resulting in several missed steps. One assessor in particular kept asking the tough questions and pushing for the documentation to prove it. 

The assessor is on the right. One left are three of our staff explaining some of our documentation. 

By the end of the day we all looking a little worn around the edges! 

Our final grade was issued last week and we got a C. We had been hoping for a B but based on what I saw of the standards I think a C is fair. I could however probably argue that the standards are based on a developed country (I think there is a strong chance they are pretty much borrowed from somewhere in Europe or America) or at least a nursing school in a big city. That said they focused on some significant weaknesses we have and improvements that need to be made. We have been putting in a lot of work based on their recommendations that day and now that the grade is final with more feedback there is more work to do. Please be praying for us as we implement these recommendations to the best of our abilities and specifically that we would be able to focus on those that will truly help our program improve and our students be better nurses when they graduate.