“Good morning. How are you today?” I smile at our visitors.

“We are okay,” they reply. “How are you?” There are four people—two sisters, their grandmother and an auntie. After a few minutes of pleasantries, they get to the point of their visit: “Why does my granddaughter look so pale? She is often tired, too,” the grandmother says. I look at the girl, who is about 16 years old. Her fingertips and the insides of her eyelids are pale. I ask her if she eats many green vegetables.

“No. I like fish and white rice,” she replies.

Then the older sister tells how she gets terrible headaches, especially on hot days.

“Do you drink much water?” I ask.

“Oh yes. Three or four cups a day,” she replies. (Not nearly enough!)

The two older ladies also present their physical ailments. They are hoping we will give them a referral to the hospital in Phnom Penh that serves poor people. However, we cannot afford to send everyone to the hospital, even though we are not charged much to refer someone ($7.50 per patient). And while the hospital is a good choice in some cases, it is not a sustainable option for helping every person seeking assistance. So we recommend that the younger, anemic-looking girl eat a lot more green, leafy vegetables and take some blackstrap molasses that we give her, hoping these high-iron foods will help her anemia. In this tropical climate, dehydration is common, so we counsel the older sister to drink two or more liters of water daily to see if that relieves her headaches. We invite them to come back in a month if they don’t feel better. The two older ladies are happy when we escort them to the local hospital. With a western person accompanying them, they receive better and more prompt care. It has been over four months, and the girls have not come back for more assistance, so we hope our recommendations helped.

Visits like these are common. Our weeks in the village are filled with people seeking help for some illness or another. Most of their ailments are lifestyle-related. Many people just need knowledge of how our Creator made us and the principles He set in place to keep our bodies healthy. If we can teach them how to take better care of themselves, how to eat a balanced diet, and how to use simple treatments for basic illnesses, they will be much better off in the long run than if we just referred them all to the hospital.

In some cases, we have been able to demonstrate the healing benefits of charcoal, both internally and externally. Even the poorest people here have access to charcoal. Blending charcoal with a bit of garlic (a natural antibiotic) and pure water has helped several peoples’ stomach problems. After one lady stepped on a nail, the infection got so bad that it was rotting the flesh all around her big toe. Over a few weeks, we regularly cleaned the wound and treated it with charcoal. God blessed the treatment, and her foot is healthy now.

As we minister to peoples’ physical needs, we see prejudices soften and trust grow. Christ’s method of ministry still works today. One man who came to us about his wife’s foot infection was hesitant about getting help from “followers of Jesus.” We went to his home, and after cleaning and bandaging his wife’s foot, we asked if we could pray for her. They accepted, and Adam prayed. We could see an inner conflict in the husband’s eyes about whether to trust us. He commented several times about how we follow Jesus, but they follow a different prophet. However, by our fourth visit to their home, his conflict seemed resolved, and he told us we were now his brother and sister.

Our medical training and experience is not sufficient for the needs here, but we praise the Lord for His ability to work through our inadequacy. Some of the most common ailments we are prepared to treat or give counsel on include diabetes, high blood pressure, stomach aches, indigestion, ulcers, headaches and wounds. Other diseases we’ve encountered include cancer, lupus, broken shoulders, Hepatitis C, liver failure, tuberculosis and epidermolysis bullosa (a rare skin disease affecting only one person in 50,000.) Obviously, we don’t have experience, training or resources to deal with all these types of problems or even to diagnose them. But we continue to teach basic health principles, hoping these will reduce the prevalence of illness.

Boaz and Ruth Church, with their children, are currently raising funds to come here and join our ministry to the Great River people. They have much more experience and knowledge about health and wellness than we do. If you have thought about pledging to a missionary family, please prayerfully consider adding your support to the Church family. And if God leads you to make this pledge, please do so today! The work here is ripe, and we need their help desperately! We look forward to the arrival of the Church family with eager excitement, knowing God has lots of work already waiting for them here, and doors are opening even before their arrival. With His help, they will be able to enter many homes and relieve suffering, thereby opening many hearts to Christ. We are witnessing just the beginnings of this harvest!

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