Fall 2008 and Winter 2009

As a result of the financial blessings provided by many of you and significant financial gifts from Friends Church (Calgary, AB) and Dr. Amanda Diep, we were able to send our “small” mission team to the Philippines for two weeks this past November.  Among the many successes achieved during the trip, the team was happy to report that the Irisan emergency medical clinic (IMEC) now fully operates under the local authority and is also expanding service to the community by offering birth assistance.  This is truly exciting for us as we have been able to hand over full financial and operational responsibility to the community fulfilling our mission of empowerment!

Although it was exciting to see the clinic up and running, the mission team consisting of John Toth and Dr. Amanda Diep quickly got to work organizing several community medical outreach trips.  In the short two week time frame Dr. Diep’s and John Toth organized four medical and dental outreaches as a joint project with MHA (our Phil. organization) and with Metro Baguio Rotary Club (Phil.).  The first joint outreach was in the village Batuan which was our second time we were able to visit this small village in the lower mountains. We were able to help over 400 people including all the students of a local elementary school. Follow that we provided two outreaches in two Benguet provincial jails with the population of 350 inmates.

Our last, and probably most memorable outreach, was held at Baguio city’s large garbage dumpsite in conjunction with the Philippine Christian Foundation. Medical aid was provided for over 200 children living at this dumpsite, leaving our mission team both exhilarated for being able to help so many and  deeply impacted by the living conditions for those children. (Please see our new pictures at our photo album page) This final outreach had such a dramatic impact on our “mission team” that after John’s presentation and recommendation to the MHF board directors, we decided to expand our outreaches. These outreaches will primarily provide help to the children that live at various cities’ huge and depressed dumpsites.

We cannot imagine worse conditions than for a child to call a garbage dump “home”!

Our team of volunteers are impassioned to do something about it!

It is impossible to recognize all of you who made this happen with your time, money, resources, and especially prayers. We did however want to recognize some of our other local partners whose medical contribution was invaluable to the success of these outreaches.  Because of the generosity of CUPS (Calgary Urban Projects Society) and Calgary’s Spy Hill Correctional Facility we were able to provide important medications to many of the people at the outreach locations as well as several other non profit organizations such as Baguio City's EMS. We are grateful for these partnerships and look forward to updating you all on our future mission trips.