Crazy in Cartagena

I am married to an amazing woman! Last week on Monday I flew to Cartagena for two days of meetings with key leaders from the local government and training with volunteers from the local pastors association in preparation for the deworming campaign scheduled for Saturday the 26th. On Tuesday morning I had to call and tell Jessie that I would be staying in Cartagena for the next two weeks and, "could she please send a bag down with more clean clothes?"

In what can only be described as a miracle, Jessie took the news very well and has really supported me as I have been stuck here on the coast since last week. (I was also pleased to see that the suitcase she sent me only had some of my clothes in it and not everything I own ; ) Thankfully, her good friend Meagan Cassel is visiting her in Bogota to keep her company.

The deworming campaign is the first of its kind in Colombia and the first time that CDA has ever undertaken a project of this size. It has been my privilege together with my friend and coworker Willie Varela to plan and coordinate the event with the support of key national and local governmental agencies, our CDA staff team and local and national Christian leaders. During the hectic last week and a half, I have had numerous meetings with key people from the Mayor's Office of Cartagena, the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Health who are working closely with CDA on the massive deworming campaign that will take place this Saturday. On Friday I gave a presentation training approximately 3,000 community leaders who will be volunteers teaching the community health education class to all those who take part in the main event this Saturday, which since I had to do it in Spanish was kind of stressful. Additionally I have been meeting with the local pastors association and in a series of meetings have trained over 1,000 volunteers from local churches who will be filling out registration forms and distributing Christian literature to each family on the day of the event.

It is incredible to see how God is working: a week ago, we had about 360 volunteers listed. Today we have more than 4,000 almost all of whom have been trained and will manning the 80 public schools at which the event will take place. This morning we began the massive task of distributing all the pills, educational material, registration material, etc. to the schools and are continuing to coordinate the efforts of all the actors in play.

It is pretty exciting to think that we get to play a critical role in a massive health campaign as well as serving as the catalyst to unite the churches of Cartagena and launch a two-part evangelistic campaign at the same time. The first step of the evangelism is having church volunteers in each one of the 80 schools who as part of their official duties will be distributing 150,000 pieces of Christian literature (one per family) donated to CDA by the Colombian Bible Society. The second step is that we orchestrated the process to ensure that at the end of the event the local churches (not CDA and not the government) will end up with all the registration sheets that have the names, addresses and phone numbers of the 500,000 people (almost half the population of the city) who will pass through the 80 sites on the day of the event. This information will then be used to do personal follow-up by the local churches who are geographically closest to where each person lives.

In the midst of the whirlwind of activity and the stress and the excitement we remain acutely aware of how much we need your prayers. It has been very clear that we are under spiritual attack - Cartagena for centuries has been a gateway for all sorts of evil and suffering into Colombia, and the enemy is not going to leave without a fight. Please specifically pray for the following:

1) that all the volunteers needed show up at their designated school on Saturday
2) that all the materials and pills are distributed correctly and without problems
3) that on Saturday all the volunteers: the doctors, nurses, educators, church volunteers, school personnel etc. will work well together and particularly that there will be no friction between the Christians and the non-Christian volunteers and that each site allows the distribution of the evangelistic literature.
3) for the health and safety of our team as we run all over the city and work bizarre hours.

Thank you so much for your ongoing prayers and support - we need you and appreciate you!


Blessings,
Jim




PS: The blog posting below is a copy of the official press release of the event and a picture from some of the literature we are distributing and that is being used in the TV, and radio mass media advertising campaign.