Wayne serves as a seconded missionary to Interchurch Medical Assistance in Democratic Republic of Congo. He is involved in full-time service with IMA/ECC affiliated health and development activities in Congo. Wayne serves as the in-country liaison officer with IMA for financial and accounting matters. Additionally, Wayne has been helping Congolese people through a development project to grow more food. Among other activities, the project distributes new seeds, disease resistant varieties of crops, and offers women’s groups small loans to purchase machines for hulling, milling, and producing oil.

Katherine is working with a group of Congolese Christian professionals in training community leaders, urban and rural, to be promoters of health in their communities. The staff of a church-related health center in Kinshasa is also using her expertise to make their medical ministry more holistic as they care for urban poor people.
Read their full journal at https://internationalministries.org/read/65596

They write – Not long ago we received the 2017 “White Cross” shipment. There were loads of rolled bandages, gloves, suture, gauze, uniforms, and infant blankets.  Someone had fun selecting those flannel prints!  Stars, trains, teddy bears, clowns, and bugs adorned blankets carefully hemmed and folded for infants in our 11 hospitals.  How grateful we are in Congo for White Cross!

The arrival of the container is a much-anticipated event, and if it’s a 40-foot container (this one was!), we mobilize all the willing workers on the Baptist compound.
Half the container is composed of reasonably sized boxes of sutures, uniforms, gauze compresses and gloves. The REST is 131 boxes of rolled bandages each weighing 260 pounds.  It takes four men and brute force to unload them from the container, then load on the pickup, and then unload them into a storeroom.  That’s 34,000 pounds total!

Every time I go on supervision visits to the Baptist hospitals in Vanga, Sala, Kikongo, Boko, Moanza, Kipata, Nselo, Sona Bata, Nsonga Mpangu, Mulolo, or Bandunduville, I visit the room where White Cross supplies are stored.  Usually the shelves are mostly empty, and the staff plead for more supplies. They will soon all be full!

Why is there so much meaning for us in sutures, gloves, and rolled bandages?
Packed into those boxes is the fragrance of the prayers that follow this shipment and the distinct reminder to our doctors, nurses, and patients, that they are being remembered.  For servants of God working in far-flung and difficult corners of God’s Congo world, that’s feeling money cannot buy.  All of us say THANK YOU for the gift of White Cross.