June 2022: Making room for Ordinary Miracles

Alex Kabende is a 26-year-old man whose situation personifies the story of many in Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp. Less than three years ago, he was thrown into a pit in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. This traumatic event severed his spinal cord and he has been unable to move or feel his legs since. He can’t even control his bodily functions and needs to constantly exchange a urinary catheter. Now, not many of the 55,000 refugees in Dzaleka are paralyzed like Alex, but many share his outlook. He sought refuge in another country with the hope that he could receive better medical attention, that he might be resettled and that he might regain use of his legs. Some foreign visitors over the years have visited him and have even promised that they would bring him to a place where he could get surgery with miraculous results. Years later, he remained in the same bed, the same room, with the same hope that someone from the outside would bring a miracle and change his life for the better.

The thing is, Alex has already experienced several ordinary miracles. A year ago, he had deep ulcers from laying in the bed. These ulcers would be hard to treat in any situation, even in America where we have special wound creams and wound nurses and ulcer-preventing hospital beds. But Alex had none of that, just a mother and father who loved him and cleaned his wounds constantly, even though they didn’t have access to running water or regular supplies of soap. They committed to moving him every 3 hours, and by the time I met him last week, his deep ulcers were already completely healed. Alex also almost died from urine infections which went into his blood stream multiple times. But his family watched him closely and called a friend with a car to drive him to the hospital every two or three weeks to change his catheter. To me, the first miracle is the fact that Alex has such a committed community that he is receiving better care than some people with on-call nurses in America.

Of course, we still pray for more miraculous healing for Alex. When my mother-in-law Jude and I visited him, we acknowledged that healing of his nerves would take a miracle, but we also acknowledged that our God can do immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine. While we were there, we also discussed ways that Alex could start strengthening his upper body and ways that he could keep his bag of urine clean and ways that he could be more comfortable in with his bodily functions. By the time we left, our YWAM translator pulled us aside to clarify any medical treatments which might restore the function in his legs. She said that this family had been hoping for a miracle from the outside for so long that they hadn’t been able to move forward with ideas about what Alex would do if he wasn’t healed.

The next week, I visited with my friend Margaret, a Malawian physical therapist. By that time, the family had hung a rope from the room’s main beam and Alex was able to do about ten pullups. Margaret helped stretch his legs to reduce the spasticity and improve blood flow. She reiterated that Alex was unlikely to walk again without a supernatural miracle, but she did share with him stories and pictures of people like him who had rich and full lives even without the use of their legs. She talked with him about the business he did before and imagined what he could do again if he gained the strength to sit up and transfer to his wheelchair and propel himself. Margaret is an experienced health coach, and even talked about how forgiving the people who did this to him would be one of Alex’s most critical steps in healing.

There are still many miracles I hope to see for Alex. My friend Roberta donated some exercise straps to help him strengthen his arms, and Margaret encouraged him to use them every hour, until he could do 100 repetitions and become quite strong. Roberta has arranged for him to receive a Swahili Bible soon, which will be his first Bible since he became a refugee. His entire face lit up when he talked about having a Bible of his own and being able to read it in his own language. Our friend Elizabeth has connected us with her husband, who is willing to build a metal structure which can help support Alex and his exercises better than the current wooden beam in the middle of his bedroom. And the YWAM staff who visit him weekly and pray for him are looking into ways to repair his wheelchair, or to use local resources to start building sustainable all-terrain wheelchairs for Alex and others like him.

We still pray for a miracle for Alex, but whether or not he receives supernatural healing, it has been encouraging to see church members bringing hope, healing, and ordinary miracles which are expanding his opportunities and outlook.

This month, pray for wisdom and direction for community trainings and work in the refugee camp. We also have a story of transformation in our local Malawian community which we would love to share with you at MalawiMillers.com/post/transformational-development

Thank you for your prayers and support, - Greg + Christina

May Monthly Details

Pastors in the Villages

At the end of the month, Greg accompanied the District Superintendent and the district’s newly trained Community Development leaders to Mkhwalasa to meet with area chiefs and a committee of faith leaders. Over the past year, this community has come together to build their own school so that their children can be educated nearby without having to cross a dangerous river. Over the next month, Greg is planning to connect with more pastors in the Mphewa area to follow up on Transformational Development training, and Christina is planning a teaching day for young women in the Mngwangwa region. Read more about the amazing things happening in communities at malawimillers.com.

The Dzaleka Refugee Camp

We have been increasingly intentional about ministry in Malawi’s refugee camp. This month we helped YWAM staff implement a program to help address medical needs in sustainable ways. Christina met with the director of the medical clinic at the camp to discuss ways to improve healthcare infrastructure. We have partnered with our friends at Inua Consulting to brainstorm ideas to increase their donor base and enable greater impact on long-term solutions for refugees in Malawi. Learn more about Inua Consulting at inuaconsulting.com

Christian Health Service Corps Member Care

Christina is working with CHSC leadership to brainstorm ways to make our organizations Missionary Care more accessible and relevant. Please pray for wisdom about whether Greg can assist with spiritual care needs in the organization, and for our missionaries overall

Stories of Patient Transformation

Christina celebrated with a patient who lost 20 kg (about 44 pounds) over the last year through discipline and lifestyle medicine. She lost more than 20% of her original body weight and improved her sugars and blood pressure without medication and is feeling great. Christina is planning to present a topic on healthy weight loss as a lecture for her colleagues at ABC Clinic next month. She is also working on presenting cases like this to the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine to complete her application as a Lifestyle Medicine Intensivist

A Wellness Center at the Lake?

Our friends have a long-term plan to build a wellness center in Salima, on Lake Malawi. Their plans include a place where people can come for classes and interventions involving nutrition, weight loss, stress management, getting away from toxic substances and returning to God’s peace. Please pray for us as we consider how we might be able to join our friends and connect others with similar passions for transformation through lifestyle medicine.

Transformational Development

“That meeting, I went to it and got [reimbursed for] my transport, then I forgot. But when they called me later, I remembered.” Reverend Nixon Nzunga, the District Superintendent tasked with overseeing more than 200 churches in our area, reflected with us over a late lunch. Greg spent the morning driving into the new-to-us region of Mkhwalasa to hear stories of transformation. Amazing things had been happening in this community long before we arrived; some years ago, a nonprofit organization called World Relief had gathered a committee of faith leaders and traditional authorities in this area to help the community manage issues like COVID and HIV. Because Nixon was a leader of church leaders, the organization invited him to an initial vision meeting, but it was the story of what the local people had done with local resources in the meantime that had us all talking now.

At first the committee of faith leaders wasn’t sure what they should do. But one of their members was a local Nazarene pastor who attended the world view training we helped coordinate in the Mphewa region last year with The Word Transforms. This pastor helped guide the committee through ideas of sustainability and techniques for asking community members about their existing resources and priorities. So the committee sat down with the Group Village Headman (GVH), the chief who was over the other chiefs in the area. They explained their intention to help the community, and asked about the resources and priorities of the area. After some time, they identified priorities of education, health, and clean water as priorities for the area.

Education seemed particularly pressing for the community. The nearest school was far away from Mkhwalasa, on the other side of a river which became impassable during rainy season. Children could not go to school at all during Malawi’s rainy months, and many stayed home altogether. The GVH was so impressed by the need for education in the community, and trusted the committee of faith leaders so much, that he used about $600 of his own money to buy a big piece of land and handed it over to the committee so that they could start making a difference.

Then the entire community came together to build a school. Men gathered together to form bricks and women gathered fallen tree limbs to fire them. Community members, mostly subsistence farmers, saved money from their harvests so that they could contribute along with their chief to pay for cement to hold the bricks together and for a builder to ensure that a 2-room schoolhouse was constructed properly. When the walls were up, the community contacted their local member of parliament, who was originally from their region, and he provided a metal roof for the schoolroom. By the time Greg, Nixon, and others went to hear about what the community had done, they were expecting government-funded teachers to arrive and had started making bricks for a second room. Some villagers had even started leveling of a football field for the children on the donated land. The Nazarene pastor had been asked to build a church on the donated land near the school, to help oversee future projects dealing with water and healthcare.

“I like this because it is a wholistic approach” commented Pastor Moses, the librarian at NTCCA where Greg teaches and the head of the Extension Program which brings theological training into pastors in the villages. “This meets spiritual and physical needs.” Moses and Patrick, another pastor and a village leader in the Lombadzi area, have been tasked with developing and leading community development projects among Nazarene churches in our region. Together with Thoko and another female pastor, they have just returned from a week-long Community Health Evangelism training in Blantyre and are evaluating how to best implement these programs in the church. Today they helped provide advice about logistics for the program in Mkhwalalsa, including property titles for the donated land and reinforcing community rather than church ownership of the new school. They also visited with some minor chiefs in the area and discussed how what the community was doing now was different from times that they sat still and waited for nonprofit organizations and well-wishers to come and help them. “They have to take total responsibility for the project which is happening” Moses explained towards the end of dinner. As we reflected on the miraculous coming together of this community, and discussed plans to follow up with pastors who were engaging in projects in other areas, Moses and Patrick were taking what they had learned in training, seeing it applied in communities, and envisioning how they could help guide and advise communities in the future.

“It changed my life.” Patrick concluded. “Now I can implement [CHE] and change the lives of others.”