As we near the end of fall and enter into a new winter in the Middle East, I wanted to take this time to thank all those reading these reports for their ongoing prayers, and to post some updates below from the last few months.
We’ve been laboring on here this fall quarter, continuing to be surrounded by needs in all areas of the ministry from both old refugee families and new refugees from ethnic/religious minorities in Syria that came in recent months.
As well, with a recent uptick in border bombings against the remnants of the militia that fought last year’s war, we are also beginning to see an increase in the mountains of some locals pre-emptively fleeing what they expect may be a second round of fighting.
That does seem quite possible in coming months and is rumored among the locals that it will be as bad, if not worse, than last year. All these uncertainties are in the Lord’s hands. We have to press on with the work around us and trust Him for the future!
In the midst of that, we’ve continued to see the Lord open doors amidst the medical and material needs of the poor here, as well as with the bakery, school (EAP) and farm programs. It is those areas that will be detailed below!
New Opportunities with New Refugees Entering the Country
As mentioned earlier this summer, there continues to be unrest and fighting in parts of Syria that are driving new Syrian refugees into these mountains. These include people from Druze, Alawite and Eastern Orthodox backgrounds. We’ve sought to increase our help towards newly displaced families that often come here with little more than a few backpacks of clothes.
They often need anything and everything to try and have enough to live in a small rented room somewhere in the mountains. We’ve been providing them with blankets, bed mats, food bags and even at times housing assistance when there are cases of significant need.
We’ve also heard from other partner churches in the country that they too are encountering large numbers of new refugees in their areas. Due to the sensitive political nature of this new displacement, there is little to no official UN help for them. Many of these new refugees had heard reports that Evangelical Christian churches would help people regardless of sectarian background, and thus are seeking churches for help they can find nowhere else.
As the Lord has provided funds, we’ve been thankful to also help pass these on to equip other local churches we know that are doing a good work reaching, teaching and serving these new refugees arriving at their doorsteps.
A Unique Opportunity to Help Two Orphan Boys via a Partner Church
This fall we also had a unique opportunity to help two local orphan boys via a partner church that was struggling to handle the needs of their particular case.
The circumstances are complex, but these orphan boys are essentially stateless, having no identity papers and both parents deceased years ago.
Earlier this summer these orphan boys had come under the care of an Evangelical church we know. Together we’ve been able to help them with some of their initial schooling and housing needs.
On the weekends, the pastor involves them in the church as well, and says they are doing well and becoming a part of the family. Pray these boys may also know the Lord!
Emergency Surgeries, Four Cancer Patients & Other Medical Needs
In the past few months the medical needs have continued to increase, especially as we have opened the doors to monthly public health screenings for anyone in need in the mountain village community. With the increased needs have come greater opportunities to enter into people’s lives compassionately and share something of the Gospel with them. Pray for all of these open doors, great or small, that the Lord would be at work in them for His glory! Pray for laborers as well.
In these past months we’ve had the difficult, sobering task of caring for four cancer patients all undergoing chemotherapy at the same time. We’ve never had such a high number of cancer patients at once in the 10 years we’ve been helping people medically. We are thankful to see how the Lord has so far provided for us to be able to help with this significant increase in case load. Three of the cases are fairly risky breast cancer cases, and the fourth case is a more treatable lymphoma in a middle-aged male.
Please pray for these cancer patients. The oldest woman of the three breast cancer cases recently finished her initial chemotherapy we began earlier this summer. However, due to the very high risk of the cancer returning for her in this area of her body, we had to help her undergo a difficult double mastectomy surgery. It is likely the other two younger women will have to have the same surgery done once they finish their chemotherapies around the end of this year.
All of these women are mothers with young children they care for at home. At this stage it is not entirely certain that all three will survive the cancer, as one young woman in particular has one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer out there. We hope the Lord would heal them if it is His will, but as well we hope they may know Him in truth, whatever the final outcome of their cases be.
In addition to the many local patients we get medications for, and the dozens of medical checks, labs and appointments each month, we’ve had several urgent medical emergencies we’ve responded to, some of them resulting in life-saving surgeries performed by nearby hospitals we bring them too.
A few weeks ago there was a local woman in her 60s who suddenly experienced excruciating pain from what appeared to be a DVT (deep vein thrombosis) in her right leg. This is a clot in the leg and can result in death from a stroke or pulmonary embolism (clot in the lung). This particular woman is someone we’ve helped for years with medications to help control her diabetes and manage her pre-existing heart condition.
She called us directly the day her DVT occurred, gasping and screaming for us to come and help her. It was a dramatic evening as the Red Cross came to transfer her to a hospital for care, only to find the hospital she went to was unable to treat DVTs and thus we had to move her rapidly ourselves down to a larger city hospital a half hour away.
In the end, the second hospital attempted to re-open her clotted leg veins but was unable to. They found a full blockage with over 30 veins closed off and had to amputate her right leg. After almost a week in the ICU after the surgery, she was stable enough to go home, and currently we are helping her with daily bandage changes and wound washing.
In recent months we had a refugee woman in her 30s who called us with a sudden recent onset of sharp stomach pain. After a few checks with a local clinic to rule out kidney stones, we found she actually had a raging case of appendicitis and needed surgery immediately. Thankfully in this case, the local hospital was able to perform the surgery and the woman is fully recovered from it by now.
We also had the ability to help with many less life-threatening, but still quite important, injuries and conditions needing surgical care. Just a few examples are outlined below:
- An older man who is among the “new” refugee population here was going blind due to cataracts in both eyes. We were able to help him with surgery in one eye and he was very thankful to be able to see again.
- A local man was also in a car accident and broke his clavicle badly enough he needed pins and screws to surgically stabilize it. We were able to also help him, and he recovered well from the accident.
- A woman connected to the local church had a serious respiratory emergency and needed to be admitted to the hospital for several days to treat and stabilize. She is also doing well and fully recovered.
- A newborn refugee baby developed jaundice severe enough to need hospitalization in a nearby NICU. Thankfully, it does not appear that any longterm damage from the jaundice was reported.
Thank you for praying for us as we continue our medical assistance ministry to the poor. Of all the areas of need, this is the most demanding, the most consuming but also the most rewarding. We see the Lord at work in it often, and pray these patients would know Him in addition to being healed.
New Opportunities at the Bakery to Help Other Local Ministries
The bakery bread distribution continues on as before, providing fresh baked bread daily to our list of needy local and refugee families in the community.
The workers there are thankful to keep baking bread, serving others while also being able to provide for their own family’s needs.
In addition to the ongoing bakery operations, we attempted something new in recent months to try and help with bread beyond just our own immediate community.
We were able to connect with another like-minded ministry in the slums of the city and deliver bread to them during their own weekend refugee outreach service.
One of the men involved in the bakery shared his testimony with the crowd of around 70+ refugees and local poor gathered in their meeting hall. It was a great opportunity for the workers up here to see how their labors can be a blessing to other churches serving similar groups of needy people outside of our own community. Everyone was really appreciative of the bread too and asked for more!
We are interested in praying about pursuing this as a future way to help serve other ministries reaching the poor in other parts of the country. We have the means and processes in place by now to help provide them with fresh bread for their own outreach events. Pray for wisdom and open doors with that if it is the Lord’s will!
Praying for Rain Amidst the Ongoing Drought and Winter Plantings at the Farms
We had a modest summer harvest this year, although growth was somewhat hindered by the ongoing drought. We’ve only had about 10in of rain the entire year. This is almost half the average rainfall of even last year, and even lower than the first few years of the farm when it rained on a normal cycle.
The drought has certainly made things more challenging. We will likely have to permanently abandon farming operations at one land location, as there is no functional well there and trucking in water each week has become untenable. The main farm has some dwindling reserves in the deeper well house, but even that has been insufficient at times, requiring outside water trucks to supplement the water tanks during planting time.
Despite the drought, we were thankful to get about an inch of rain the other week from a storm that unexpectedly blew in off the Mediterranean. Though it did not last as long as hoped, it did give us some much-needed moisture out here. It gave our late fall lettuce enough of a kick to begin harvesting this week and distributing to refugee families. It was also just enough to soften the ground to get our winter plantings in. We sow in hope of future rain to replenish the ground wells and grow these winter seedlings into a full crop of cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, garlic, onions and beans.
In a drought there isn’t much that you can do except pray and wait. Pray for rain with us, it is greatly needed not just for the farms but for this parched land in general!
New School Year, New EAP Changes & More Tutoring Opportunities
After finishing up our summer English classes, we were glad to see progress in so many of the kids that attended the classes. We were able to register many (though unfortunately not all) of the new children that came to English classes into the local Christian school this semester.
As of this month, we have 38 students from the English classes we are currently helping to support in the Christian school, sponsored under our Education Assistance Program to fully cover their books and tuition costs. In addition to this, we have another 12 students from English classes being helped to buy books and cover registration fees for reputable government schools nearby their homes, as in these cases the families live too far from the Christian school to afford transporting their children there.
Due to several factors, we implemented the decision this year to only support children in the private Christian school from K-9th grade. The higher class levels (10-12th grade) had begun to have very few students, due to economic issues impacting other local families that used to enroll their children there, and the dwindling class sizes affected both the cost and quality of education. The Christian school eventually had to close their 10-12th grade levels as without our sponsored kids as they had only a handful of other students, not making it viable any longer.
The older students that were supported by the EAP in those higher grades were transitioned to nearby government schools where they are doing well and still connected with our ministry in various ways. They still receive sponsorship help for books, uniforms and registration fees. The younger kids in K-9 seem to be thriving, and the Christian school does seem better able to focus their resources and attention now on this core primary school age instead of being divided over the upper and lower education levels.
Unlike last year where there were many disruptions due to the ongoing war, this year we’ve been able to provide more regular tutoring sessions each week for struggling students. We want to see them succeed! There are now opportunities a couple of times each week where students can come and get free tutoring from our volunteers.
This often focuses on improving their English (as much of the school curriculum is in English), but sometimes also involves basic homework help on things like math or science. Pray for these students and our ongoing interactions with them! Pray the Lord would redeem the time and enable us to serve them in such a way it genuinely helps improve their academics.
Pray for Us as We Head into the Winter!
We do appreciate the prayers and support of those reading these quarterly updates. As we end our fall and head into winter, pray for us with the winter needs ahead. Though it’s been a dry winter so far, it may not remain a very warm one, and this time of year we frequently get requests for more blankets, heaters and diesel heating fuel.
As well, pray for us regarding the looming possibility of a second phase of war and the needs (and Gospel opportunities) this will likely bring to our area of the mountains. We’ve already begun stockpiling some bags of rice and cracked wheat to have ample on hand if meals are needed for hundreds again. By God’s grace we and the local church are here to serve in such times as this, and we hope to do so again if need be.
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