Medical Mission Team in Benin, West Africa

I am going to start updating you on my parents ministry in Benin, West Africa. They have been full time missionaries with the International Missions Board for over 20 years. Below is a recent email from them. Please keep them and the medical team in prayer!

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Dear Prayer Partners,

The team arrived yesterday morning at 4:00 a.m. They and all of their luggage arrived at the same time!! Praise God! After sleeping, shopping, pill cutting and bagging yesterday, we jumped into the work like a level 5 hurricane! We treated 200 prisoners. On the prison grounds the government had built a chapel (cement floor, tin roof), and we were asked to set up the medical clinic there. Six hundred inmates are crowded into several cramped buildings butting up to and around the chapel. The small open area is dirt, the living conditions appear to be village level. We did not enter the sleeping quarters, but one guard explained that the inmates sleep on thin straw mats on the floor. If an inmate does not have someone on the outside taking care of him (food and clothes), his living situation is horrible. The prison only offers one meal a day of rice, beans or African “pate.” One inmate, with emotion, spoke to me of the abandoned prisoners.

A team of Christian brothers and sisters from the local area worked diligently alongside our volunteers. Each group brought in was evangelized twice, and one of the pastors laid hands on and prayed over each individual. They will continue to minister to the prisoners. Pray for them!

The prisoners were orderly, polite and thankful, as well as were the prison directors and guards. Sixty of the 600 are women. One came in with a 5 month old baby. Some had been incarcerated for years, some for only several days. There were those with huge abscesses as well as those with broken limbs having disjointedly healed.

Of all the prisoners I talked to while writing down their symptoms, only one asked me for something. A leg. He’d been shot by the police, in the head (where shrapnel from the bullet is lodged) and in the lower leg. In the hospital he lost his leg up to his thigh.

Each of the volunteers worked non-stop from the moment we arrived, until we packed up. It was very hot. Lunch consisted of a granola bar and water. Yet they served these inmates as if they were their sisters and brothers. Pray for Matt, Dr. Mark and Audre, Mark T., Eric, Rick, Richard (who lost his mom just days before leaving the States for this trip), Cindy, Missy, Lori and Leslie. Jack, who came with the team, is visiting an orphanage in village quite distant from where we are doing medical work.

Yours in Christ, Barbara and Jeff