printer-friendly
cover story
The power to transform the world
Two Bethel alumni find that to serve means to give what you have and trust God for the rest.
by Melanie Zuercher
As a liberal arts college founded by Anabaptist Christians, Bethel College stands on four central values that inform everything it does. One of these is “an ethic of service, that deems concern for the powerless to be intrinsic to the Christian gospel and stresses peacemaking and voluntary service.”
Perhaps nothing in recent memory has called forth “a concern for the powerless” like the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that, on Jan. 12, all but shattered the nation of Haiti, already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. There may never be a way to fully count the number of dead, but it is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands, with a million left homeless.
Material aid and personnel have poured into Haiti from around the globe, although getting the help to where it’s needed has sometimes proven difficult and frustrating, given the massive damage to already shaky Haitian infrastructure. Two Bethel alumni with very different skills have found ways to address some of the immediate and pressing needs.
Jennifer (Scott) Koontz ’98 lives in Newton with her husband, Matt ’98, and their three young children, Caleb, Abigail and Naomi. Jenni (the 2009 Young Alumnus Award winner) completed her medical residency in 2008 and recently began practicing at Pinnacle Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics in Newton.
Straight out of Bethel, Jenni and Matt spent two years with Mennonite Voluntary Service in Hamilton, Ontario, where Jenni was involved in several public health projects, and she has not lost her heart for service. In the years since finishing her MVS term, Jenni earned a master’s in public health, completed medical school (both at the University of Kansas) and gave birth to three children. She has managed to be involved in several service projects but has long wished she could use her medical skills and knowledge in an underserved country, which until now – aside from a two-week medical mission in Belize – hasn’t been possible.
After the earthquake in Haiti, Jenni realized that for the first time in many years, her family and work life were at a place that could allow her to go on a short-term assignment. She began checking her contacts and was quickly drawn to Heart to Heart International, which she already knew about since it was founded by Kansas City physician Gary Morsch.
“I sent an e-mail saying, ‘If you need volunteers, let me know,’” she recalls. “I went to hear the Martin Luther King speech at Bethel [Monday, Jan. 18] and got a call during that. I checked my messages afterward and they said, ‘Can you leave Wednesday?’ Matt ran some errands for me – he got a mosquito net at the Coleman store in Wichita – and I left at 3 a.m. that Wednesday.” Her co-workers at Pinnacle were supportive as well, offering to cover her patients on short notice and even donating money for airfare, as did Jenni and Matt’s congregation, Bethel College Mennonite Church.
Jenni’s Heart to Heart medical team consisted of her, Via Christi (Wichita) medical resident Rick Moberly and Rachel Detamore, a nurse from Indiana. They flew to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, since no commercial flights were going into Haiti’s heavily damaged airport, and went overland to Haiti. Three Haitian medical students joined them in Port-au-Prince.
For the next week, the team conducted a mobile clinic in tents and under tarps erected in a sports stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince. They saw about 300 people a day, many with “horrible injuries,” Jenni says. “There were femur and arm fractures, infections that needed surgery or amputations. Things were beginning to transition to public health issues like diarrhea, pneumonia and dehydration.”
Despite the language barrier – most Haitians speak Haitian Kréyol – Jenni found that pain and healing, as well as gratitude and love, are universal languages. “I heard ‘Thank you, thank you’ so many times,” she says, despite the fact that she often had to cause more pain to help promote healing.
“I’ve never seen anything here like those wounds, although I’m sure some paramedics have. I cleaned a lot of wounds and debrided a lot of dead tissue, and we didn’t always have enough [local anesthetic], but I never had anyone over the age of five cry. They would pray or sing hymns or do whatever they needed to bear the pain.
“It gave me hope – that they knew how to cope, that they knew to turn to God.” She isn’t sure, she says, why she felt she had to go. “I have the skills and knowledge they need, and a family and church who support me. I was talking to [Associate Professor of Health and Physical Education] Russ Graber recently, and he told me, ‘That’s just you – it would be uncharacteristic if you didn’t go.’ I felt purpose, and that guides what I do.”
Rick McNary ’95 says he definitely feels guided – to the point that he refers to what he does now, running an organization that prepares millions of meals for the hungry and starving, as “a miracle.” Rick, who calls himself “a late bloomer,” was 29 years old when he started college. He was a carpenter with a goal of owning his own construction company, then found himself called to pastor a Disciples of Christ church in Potwin and decided he needed more education. Bethel’s reputation for academic excellence attracted him, he says, and he completed a degree in Bible and religion.
Over the years, he led a number of mission and service trips to countries outside the United States. Eight years ago, in Nicaragua, he met a tiny girl – “filthy, smelly and beautiful” – who put her arms around his neck and asked him to feed her because she was starving. Much later, when he had finally managed to stop crying, he says, he knew that the course of his life had changed. “What I wanted,” he says, “was to feed hungry people and to get as many people in the U.S. as I could to help.”
It took time. He got some friends together with whom he could talk and pray about his vision. He found the “recipe” for a high-protein, vitamin-rich meal that could be packaged to be stored for as long as necessary, then reconstituted with hot water. He made an important contact with the Salvation Army, which has a high success rate of being able to deliver aid where it’s needed. He formed a board of directors of three El Dorado business leaders – and also got former Senators Bob Dole (Kansas) and George McGovern (South Dakota) as honorary board members. He discovered through research that feeding schoolchildren is one of the most effective ways to build capacity in poor countries – alleviating hunger to promote education.
The organization got a name – Numana, meant to evoke biblical manna, although it is by design a 501(c)3, rather than a para-church, organization. It got corporate sponsors and donors of the food as well as packaging material, including the boxes. And last year, the board settled on Haiti as the destination for the first food shipment of 285,120 meals (each packet can feed six), or enough packets to fill a shipping container.
That was the number that came together at the first Numana packaging event that took place at the El Dorado Civic Center, Dec. 29-30, 2009. Two weeks later, the earthquake struck Haiti. The Salvation Army head called Rick. “Can we airlift that food to Haiti?” he asked. “And can you get us more?”
So Numana organized another event in El Dorado, this time putting together almost 700,000 meals. Col. Starrett from the Salvation Army called near midnight at the end of that event to tell an exhausted Rick that the first packages of Numana food were now being dropped into Haiti on pallets.
The next morning, Rick says, he and his wife, Christine, got up at 5 to pray together as they do almost every day. As they prayed, Christine began to cry. When he asked her why she was crying, she said, “Don’t you get it? Our fi rst packages of food from Numana are dropping into Haiti from heaven.”
Numana’s original goal for its first year of operation was 1 million meals. By the end of March, Rick says, the organization will have packaged close to 10 million, with events taking place in the Kansas Coliseum near Wichita, on the Bethel and Wichita State University campuses, and scheduled for Kansas City and Chicago.
“All the success is from God,” Rick says. “This is the only miracle, besides my children, that I’ve been able to be part of.
“How did we know to go to Haiti at this time? One thing I’ve learned over the years is to pay attention to what God is doing.”
Rick grew up as a preacher’s kid and then was a pastor himself for 20 years before giving full time to Numana. He used to think, he says, that God was “most concerned with my behavior. Now I know that God is not looking for slaves – he’s looking for partners.
“Numana is not me, but it’s God working through me. I’m not overwhelmed [by it] because I can’t make this happen. I’m only required to steward it.”
When he was a student at Bethel, Rick says, in one of Duane Friesen’s classes they read Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink. One thing from Wink he still remembers, he says: “We have to believe we have the power to transform the world, without good demonstrable proof.”
Bringing HOPE to Haiti
Cliff Dick, North Newton, graduated from Bethel in 1981 and went from there to three years of service with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Bangladesh. In the spring of 1985, he met David McKenzie, executive director of a then 10-year-old Canadian charitable organization, HOPE International Development Agency, founded with this mission: “to enable people in the developed world to connect with people in the poorest communities on earth through compassionate giving and other opportunities to help.”
Cliff has been working with HOPE International pretty much ever since. He is currently director of international relations as well as president of HOPE International Development Agency-USA.
Six days after the earthquake, on Jan. 18, Cliff went to the Dominican Republic, where HOPE International has a 30-year partner based in San José de Ochoa. Since Jan. 12, the DR – which has become “the major transit point for most material aid going into Haiti,” Cliff says – has been the staging ground for HOPE International’s support of its Haiti partners involved in health care through clinics, hospitals and public health projects. That support has come in the form of moving medicine and basic health supplies to Port-au-Prince and other parts of the country, since injured Haitians have been leaving the capital to go wherever they have hope of getting treatment.
Cliff traveled with a load of medical supplies to Haiti, crossing at Jimani, about 100 km east of Port-au-Prince (he was near the border when the 5.9 aftershock hit Jan. 20). “Haitians and Dominicans have [historically] not always gotten along very well,” he says. “What was profoundly wonderful to see is how much Dominicans want to help – everyone I talked to wanted to know what they could do.”
On Feb. 3, Barry Bartel ’84, Council Grove, left for Santo Domingo to spend about 10 days as a consultant for HOPE International, helping facilitate the continuing movement of material aid from the DR to Cap-Haïtien in the north as well as to Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns in the south that were at or near the earthquake’s epicenter. After spending three years with MCC in Haiti in the mid-1980s and then five years with MCC in Bolivia 1998-2003, Barry has an unusual and valuable set of skills: overseas administrative experience combined with fluency in Spanish and facility with Haitian Kréyol.
For more on HOPE International, see www.hope-international.com/index.php.