Healing the Hurting | Building Healthy Communities | Transforming Lives

AID REACHES

NEPAL SEE REPORT PAGE 2

August 2015The Newsletter of Blessings International

AID REACHES NEPAL! With your help, Blessings provides free medicines to victims within days.

“We were walking on a trail to a village when the second earthquake hit,” says Dr. Jenn Jung, who was on an In His Image (IHI) medical missions team in Nepal helping to treat earthquake victims. “All we could do was sit down and wait it out.”

After the ground stopped shaking around them, instead of hiking on to their intended destination, the team decided, for their own safety, to return to their base camp. Immediately upon their return, four men carrying a severely injured woman approached them. “A wall of her home collapsed on her during the earthquake and she had a compound fracture, among other injuries,” says Dr. Jung. Fortunately, the IHI medical team was there with the supplies needed to treat her.

That team from IHI was just one of several disaster response teams traveling to Nepal supplied with medicines from Blessings International. Another IHI team was on the ground in Nepal just days after the first earthquake. “We have a doctor from our program who is Nepali, which was important in quickly obtaining permission to be there. The government won’t allow anyone to just show up. That is a good thing, because when we arrived the airport was complete chaos,” said Dr. Mitch Duininck with In His Image.

Aided by local guides, the IHI team traveled to some villages outside of the capital, Kathmandu, to conduct medical clinics. Because of the extensive earthquake

NEPAL

damage, the team brought their own tents with them to sleep in and also carried much of their own food. “Some of the people on our team had never even camped before, so this was a real stretch for them, but they did very well,” says Dr. Duininck.

Another doctor on the team named Kris Crawford added, “We encountered a country with breathtaking natural beauty but with people hurting and gripped by fear.” Dr. Crawford asks for everyone to continue to remember the Nepali people in their thoughts and prayers. “Please continue to pray for the Nepali people. There are so many who have lost loved ones, suffered injury or lost their homes. There was no one we met who wasn’t impacted with fear. The enemy would use this to grip the country in fear and uncertainty unless the Gospel and Peace of Christ can flood in.”

Blessings is honored to help teams like these traveling to provide emergency aid. If you would like to help provide medicine to aid in disaster situations, please consider supporting our Emergency Disaster Relief Fund.

Barry Ewy, Blessings CEO, volunteering at the 1Nation1Day pharmacy

HAITIA MOBILE HEALTH CLINIC FOR ORPHANS IN HAITI

Blessings International is in the process of forming a new mobile medical clinic, staffed by an American nurse, that will travel to approximately 30 different

orphanages every two to three months to provide basic healthcare services. By providing health care to the same children on a routine basis, we will be able to make a lasting impact on their lives. Stay tuned for more details! If you would like to help Blessings provide medicines to orphanages in Haiti and around the world, please consider donating to our Medicines for Orphans Fund through www.blessing.org/donate.

300 MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS, AND THOUSANDS OF PRESCRIPTIONS IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC!

COMINGSOON!

The 2015 1Nation1Day outreach took place the third week of July 2015 in the Dominican Republic (DR). This major outreach culminated on July 25 with evangelistic services conducted in 20 different stadiums located across the nation.

The stadiums, on that night, were filled with tens of thousands of people, including 50,000 to 60,000 in the nation’s capital alone. The 1Nation1Day campaign has been called the “largest global missions outreach in history.” To organize and operate an event this large, 2,500 missionaries traveled to the DR, including some 300 medical professionals who conducted medical outreaches across the country.

Blessings’ CEO Barry Ewy was one of those missionaries. As a pharmacist, he ran a temporary pharmacy set up in the Olympic Stadium in the nation’s capitol of Santo Domingo. Blessings was the main supplier of medicine, donating over $25,000 worth, that was distributed by medical teams that spanned throughout the nation in order to reach Dominicans even in remote parts of the country.

Dr. Ruth, of Global Outreach, describes what she encountered during the strategic event, “We have seen people with high blood pressure who haven’t seen a

doctor in years; people with diabetes; and we been able to give them medicine for free; vitamins for free…”

Barry says the 1Nation1Day events were tremendously well-run, multifaceted and life-changing. In addition to medical outreaches, the 1Nation1Day team gave out tens of thousands of shoes, hosted leadership training seminars, built homes, installed water filtration systems, held ethical business seminars and much more. Blessings is honored to be a partner with 1Nation1Day and was able to bless the people of the DR with free medicine because of donations received from our supporters.

Dr. Ruth says outreaches like this help Christians actively demonstrate God’s love, “God has sent us to, in a sense, be His eyes, His ears, His hands to help meet the needs of the whole nation, not only spiritually but He’s meeting the people where they are. He’s meeting the medical needs. He has literally come to the whole nation of the Dominican Republic to pour out His love. He’s using us to help pour out His love on His people.”

Photos courtesy 1Nation1D

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“God has sent us to, in a sense, be His eyes, His ears, His hands..."

Code #11864

Text to give by texting “Medicines” to 41444

Federal employees can donate through the Combined Federal Campaign #11864

State and Local government employees can also give to Blessings through their payroll giving plan

Give online at www.blessing.org

For more information or to order medicine, go to www.blessing.org or email info@blessing.org

Mail gifts to P.O. Box 35292, Tulsa OK 74153-0292, USA. Make checks payable to Blessings International.

Barry Ewy, PharmD, JD, MHA

For more than 30 years, Blessings International has worked to heal the hurting by providing life-saving pharmaceuticals, vitamins and medical supplies to medical mission teams, clinics and hospitals located around the world; to build healthy communities by treating the poor and victims of endemic medical problems, outbreaks of disease or overwhelming disasters; and to transform lives by actively demonstrating the love and compassion of Jesus Christ.

What is Blessings International?

As I walk through our warehouse, I will often stop to read the names of the countries that will receive the medicines that we ship to traveling medical teams. On any day of the week, the names read like a list from a gathering of nations and include countries such as Guatemala, Ghana, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Bolivia, and on and on. It’s truly exciting to see the many nations that are receiving medicines they so desperately need.

Even more exciting than seeing where the medicines are going is to learn about how those pharmaceuticals have been used. We recently received a letter from Julie Gibbs, RN, and Kymberly Rittman, MD, who took a team to an area near Hinche, Haiti. They wrote to say:

“Thanks to you, we were able to hold a medical clinic for 4½ days and treat 622 patients and had all the medicine we needed to improve their health. Every patient who came through the clinic got to hear the Gospel message and 35 lives were saved for eternity! Several of our patients probably would not have survived if God had not sent us to Haiti when He did. A two-year-old girl had pulled over a pot of boiling water and had third-degree burns over her whole back, bottom and elbows. We had

just the right medication and dressings for her burns and were able to see her healing before our eyes over the four days she came to the clinic. A three-month-old baby girl, Louvia, with severe pneumonia probably would not have survived another day without help. We want to thank you for the role you play by providing affordable medicine for us to take with us. We could never make an impact like this without your help.”

I just returned from a missions trip to the Dominican Republic with Missions.Me as part of their 1Nation1Day nationwide outreach. It was tremendous to be there and help distribute Blessings’ medicines to so many people. Thousands of patients, all across the nation, were treated during that week-long event. It was an honor to help serve the sick and spread the love of Christ.

Your gifts and your prayers enable Blessings to heal the hurting, build healthy communities and transform lives in places like Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and around the world. For that I say a sincere “thank you!”

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CEO’s Corner

"We could never make an impact like this without your help.”