8/5/2009 9:19:00 AM Helping hands: clinic offers mobile medical assistance
COURTESY PHOTOSue Pfeil, who, with her husband, has spent 10 years working as a missionary in Kyrgyzstan, holds a little boy who was sent to the orphanage after his parents died. In addition to being an orphan, the boy needed surgery to repair a hole in his heart.
Did you know?
For more than 10 years, missionaries in Kyrgyzstan have provided medical care to the people in a mobile clinic provided by the Orphan Grain Train.
For more on Grain Train efforts in Kyrgyzstan, go to http://www.ogt.org/index.php/internationalefforts/asia_full/kyrgyzstan/
Editor's note: Since its inception in 1992, the Orphan Grain Train has shipped more than 63 million pounds of goods around the world and has expanded to include 19 divisions situated around the country. This week, the Daily News is looking at some of the people behind the Norfolk-based organization and some of their special projects.
* * *
Unless you've volunteered with the Orphan Grain Train, you may have never heard of the country of Kyrgyzstan.
Situated in southwest Asia, it borders China and is just a stone's throw from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once part of the Soviet Union, the country is still flexing its political and economic wings.
About the size of Nebraska, Kyrgyzstan is home to around 5 million Kyrgzs, Uzbeks and Russians, as well as a number of Americans, including the Rev. Bob and Sue Pfeil.
In 1997, the Pfeils, who are Wisconsin natives, spent several weeks doing mission work in Kazakhstan, which borders Krygyzstan. Wanting to do more, they, along with the Rev. Tim Nickel and his wife, Rita, volunteered to move to Kyrgyzstan where the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was hoping to start a church.
While their husbands "planted" a new church, Mrs. Pfeil and Mrs. Nickel managed a mobile medical and eyeglass clinic.
The clinic, built on a 53-foot semi-trailer chassis, was shipped to Kyrgyzstan by Orphan Grain Train in 1999. A semi-tractor pulls it on its circuit of villages to deliver medical and dental services that would otherwise not be available.
Among the people the Pfeils served is a little boy named Victor whose father had died of tuberculosis and whose mother died of lung cancer.
"His mother signed papers for him to become a ward of the state. She wanted him baptized," Sue Pfeil said.
But Victor's story doesn't end there.
The little boy needed surgery to repair a hole in his heart. The hospital agreed to waive the $600 fee normally charged for the use of an "oxygenator," if the Pfeils could provide blankets, sheets and pillows and other second-hand medical supplies.
"Praise the Lord for all the Orphan Grain Train supplies," she said.
In addition to managing the mobile clinic, the Pfeils and Nickels have distributed 85 containers of clothing, food, medical supplies and other merchandise to orphanages, homes for the elderly, hospitals, churches and recognized social agencies.
After 10 years in the mission field, both couples are coming back to the United States this summer. But they are leaving their mark on the people of Kyrgyzstan.
Recently, a woman on the street stopped Mrs. Pfeil and asked her the time.
" . . . then she asked if I was German. When I said I was American, she asked if I knew Jesus. She is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and went on to tell me all about Jesus," Mrs. Pfeil said.
Another woman recently asked to be baptized.
"She told me the Holy Spirit had been talking to her heart and she felt such peace and calmness with her baptism," Mrs. Pfeil said.
* * *
Tomorrow: Learn how the Orphan Grain Train's has responded to domestic disasters.
