St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Jazz & Ice Cream Fest a Huge Success

 Evansville, IN  August 9, 2011.    Under the banner of “The Pathway to Fellowship” the fellowship, evangelism and stewardship committees“ sponsored two nights (July 17^th and August 8^th) of wonderful music, fellowship and ice cream treats.  The music was presented by “Knight  Hour,“ a group (Chris Jones, Amanda Jones, Ed Jones and John Goth) under the direction of Chris Jones, a member of the congregation and   sophomore at Ball State.  The evening was created for benefit of the congregation and the neighborhood.  Under a perfect sky and pleasant temperatures the group played before more than a hundred people who had gathered in St. Paul’s Courtyard to hear many classic and favorite jazz compositions.  Every one in attendance thoroughly enjoyed themselves and they expressed the hope for such evenings in the future.

A Day at SISTER JOANNA’S TABLE

Evansville, IN August 21, 2010.  Activity begins in Sister Joanna’s Table around 6:30 AM for the chefs as they get ready for the day’s meal.  The steward and others come at 9 or 10 to begin all the preparation needed to make the hall ready for the diners who are expected at 11:30 AM.

This was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s day to prepare and serve. Nine different churches participate in the program, each taking or sharing a particular Saturday each month.  Volunteer help is needed each week.  You don’t need to be a member of the church responsible that Saturday to offer your help. You are always welcome and appreciated.

The diners come from the Evansville – Henderson – Chandler – Boonville areas.  Most are families in need of help and a hot meal, but there is a spattering of homeless guests.  Some are regulars coming every Saturday.  Some only come on the day that Adam’s Pantry distributes a week’s worth of food.  All are welcome.

The meal begins with announcements and grace. Guests are invited to stay and help clean up (sweep and mop).  All meals are nutritionally balanced.  This particular Saturday the menu was lasagna, green beans and mushrooms, garlic bread, tossed salad, coffee, lemonade, milk and a brownie/ice cream dessert.

The Community Soup Kitchen is particularly grateful to those who donate food (usually desserts) and volunteer time and energy.  As they say, “many hands make the work light.”

Pictured below are volunteers and guest on this particular Saturday.  On this day 153 meals were served.  We hope our diners see and feel God’s love through our efforts to show how we are concerned and care.

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REPORT OF CHILE MEDICAL MISSON TRIP

August 16, 2010 Evansville, IN  The members of the International Medical Relief Medical Team arrived at the airport in Santiago, Chile in the early evening of July 30, 2010. We were met by Pablo Ruiz, the IMR representative and administrative team leader. We got into a van and were driven about 10 miles south of the capital city to spend the night in cabins at a camp run by the religious group “Youth With a Mission”, which has many chapters in many countries.

The following morning, we went to the Santiago bus station and loaded our many duffel bags of medical supplies as well as our baggage. There we also made the acquaintance of several members of Youth With a Mission who were going to serve as our translators. Two of the translators were Chileans, and the others were American students who had been participating in an intensive Spanish language training program for the past 4 months.

The bus ride took five and a half hours, and we arrived in the early evening at the town of Constitucion, one of the areas hardest hit last February. We were told that in Constitucion, most of the damage had been caused not so much by the earthquake as by the subsequent tsunami. Over the next few days, while on our way to various work sites, we saw many open lots where collapsed buildings and debris had been cleared away, and other buildings had been seriously weakened by water damage. We were assigned our sleeping quarters in a “cabana”, which would be our headquarters for the remainder of the mission. The “cabana” consisted of a two-storey, rather rickety structure containing 3 large rooms, each consisting of an open bay with bunk beds, and a kitchen overlooking the estuary of the Maule River. Over the next few days, we became used to the sight of ferries taking trucks across the river, even though there was a modern highway bridge just upstream from where we were staying. We heard later that the tsunami had lifted the bridge off its foundations and slammed it back down; its structural integrity is still doubtful, so ordinary cars are allowed to use it to cross the river but heavier vehicles have to use the ferry. There is a large island at the mouth of the Maule River and we were told that there had been 300 or so people attending a summer festival there when the tsunami hit. People on the shore could hear their cries for help, but they could do nothing to help them; none of the people who had been on the island were ever seen again.

Our team consisted of one physician, two physician assistants, a dentist, two medical students who took vital signs and dispensed the medications ordered by the health care providers, and of course the translators. My Spanish is quite correct and relatively fluent, so my patients understood what I was saying to them, but I had tremendous difficulty understanding what they were saying back to me, because their Chilean accent is very strong and they spoke very rapidly. Initially, I had to ask for the help of the translators with every patient at first, but over the next few days, I started to get used to their speech patterns, and only called for a translator if a patient’s history was unusually long and complex.

The next morning, we went out on our first mission to a collection of temporary shelters on the outskirts of town. At this first mission site, we were in a small, dim wooden shelter divided by curtains for (semi) privacy.  We had no imaging studies available, and no laboratory facilities other than “dipstick” urinalysis, but this did not constitute nearly such a disadvantage as you might think. Most diagnoses are made by taking a careful history of the patient’s complaint and appropriate past medical history, and then performing a careful physical examination. Even in the major medical centers here in the U.S.A., most ancillary studies are done merely to confirm what the health care provider is already 99% sure is wrong with the patient. So, even though our physical setting was quite primitive, I am confident that we were able to diagnose and treat our patients properly. At the end of the morning, we said goodbye to president of the neighborhood, who expressed profound gratitude for our efforts to help the people living there.

In the afternoon, we went to a small one-storey clinic along the coast north of town. There is no physician permanently assigned to this clinic, and it is staffed by a nurse who performs blood pressure checks and gives health promotion classes. Many of the patients we saw said that time and distance kept them from seeing a health care provider very often, so they were very grateful for the care we could provide them.

At every site, our dentist worked long and hard, although for the most part he could only do extractions of badly decayed and/or abscessed teeth. He did not have the proper amalgam and equipment to fill cavities, so he could only instruct his patients to see a local dentist as soon as possible.

The next morning, we went to the only surviving clinic building in Constitucion and met the Medical and Administrative Directors. We learned that even this building had been damaged in many areas, so that immediately after the earthquake, inpatients had to be crowded into meeting rooms and storage rooms, or any others which were still relatively intact. The Medical Director, Dr. Parra, told me that at this time, most of the patients with injuries have either died, recovered, or are in rehabilitation. He said that the Chilean Government had quickly trucked in large tanks of clean drinking water to the refugee camps, so there was no outbreak of gastrointestinal disease. Some hepatitis A immunizations were given, but only to children in certain high risk areas. Unfortunately, he said there remain a significant number of persons in the community with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The clinic building itself was very busy and crowded, but the patient flow appeared well organized. In the large waiting area, there were many wall posters on various medical subjects such as H1N1 influenza, and brochures on many subjects such as how to address emotional problems brought on by traumatic events. There was even a television set showing health promotion videos, although it looked slightly incongruous in a room heated by a wood stove.

The town hospital had been totally destroyed, and although the Chilean Army had set up a mobile field hospital on the site, there is still an acute shortage of health care providers and facilities. I heard later that if a person needs to see a doctor, he/she must arrive at the health care facility at 4:00 in the morning to sign up on a waiting list to see if he/she can be seen by a doctor the next day. I now began to understand why all our patients were so grateful, even though our resources to help them were sometimes quite limited.

The Chilean Government had asked for the help of a medical team to help with an anticipated increase in numbers of patients with acute respiratory ailments due to living in close quarters in the shelters [and breathing particulate matter from the smoke emitted by wood stoves, I might add]. And we certainly saw many patients with various respiratory complaints, but we saw persons with many other problems as well. There were babies with ear infections, and children with diarrhea, and adults with arthritis, for example. And there were some patients who had already been diagnosed with various chronic ailments by Chilean doctors, and were either already undergoing treatment or had appointments to see an appropriate specialist. More often than not, we could do no more than say that we agreed with the diagnosis and treatment and/or referral plan, but we had brought no sophisticated American technology or medications that could hasten the resolution of these problems. But they never seemed disappointed, and thanked us anyway. If nothing else, they got a little more reassurance that their conditions were being managed as well as possible. I had brought along many different health promotion information sheets on many subjects (in Spanish), and I distributed one or more to my patients whenever they were relevant to his/her health problem.

After listening to Dr. Parra, I looked more carefully for signs and symptoms suggestive of emotional and psychological disorders. Sure enough, I found many persons who had bizarre neurological or musculoskeletal symptoms that were inconsistent with normal anatomical pathways or physiology. Of course, that sort of problem cannot be cured in a short patient visit, so I could only recommend that they make an appointment to get counseling. I did, however, try to reassure them that their problems are not their fault, rather that they are normal reactions by normal people to a highly abnormal situation, and that they can be helped. As always, my patients expressed their deep gratitude for what little I could do for them.

I was greatly impressed by the Chilean Government’s response to the disaster. The shelters in the camps are small, only about 10 feet by 15 feet, and are made of thin lumber, but they are covered by plastic tarps, and had wood stoves to heat them in the winter (i.e., right now). There are Porta-Potties, communal showers with hot water, large tanks with clean drinking water, and communal outdoor ovens for residents to bake their daily bread. [These ovens appeared to be made of straw and mud bricks, and were built in a corbelled style reminiscent of an Egyptian pyramid. I asked one of the ladies in the camp if this is a traditional Chilean style, and she said it is.] The residents are therefore in tolerably good shape, except for the continuing sorrow from having lost their homes and nearly all their possessions, and an uncertain future.

The Chilean health care system appears to be quite sophisticated, with all of the career and equipment specialties that we have here in the U.S.A., but they had nowhere nearly enough of anyone or anything to cope with the sudden influx of large numbers of patients coupled with the collapse of most of the health care buildings and the ruination of most of their medical equipment. For the most part, the care we gave in the camps was no different from what Chilean doctors would have given, but the logistical difficulties of getting patients from the camps to overcrowded medical facilities, or getting too few health care providers to see patients in the camps are almost insoluble. I can readily understand why the Chilean Government had asked for our help.

After the first couple of days, things kind of run together in my memory. Each day, we would go out to a different group of shelters and see patients, often to one camp in the morning and another in the afternoon. I mostly remember the politeness of the patients and the Chilean medical staff, and always the patients’ thanks at the end of each medical encounter, no matter how much or how little we might have been able to help them. And always the warm smiles and helpfulness extended by all the Chileans we met.

On the last day of our mission, I was unfortunate enough to come down with what would be called “Montezuma’s revenge” if I had been in Mexico. [Perhaps one could call it “the Mapuches’ revenge,” because the Mapuches are a major Native American tribe who fiercely resisted the Spanish conquistadors for many years back in the early days of Chile.] Anyway, I woke up with severe nausea, diarrhea, weakness, body aches and generally feeling like something the cat dragged in. I felt terribly guilty, but I had to beg off going out to the camps that last day. It is probably just as well, because I might have given what I had to the patients I saw. I do Travel Medicine consultations in my Stateside job, so I well know that sometimes you can get sick no matter how carefully you watch your eating and drinking, but I would much rather have gotten sick on an ordinary vacation than on a mission like this. Anyway, I am glad I made the trip, and hope that I was able to help the people of Chile who were so kind to me.

Jonathan R.C. Green
Evansville, Indiana

Eastside Dinner Club – Wizard of Oz

July 9, 2010  Newburgh, IN   Indeed, St. Paul’s Eastside Dinner Club followed the “yellow brick road” to a wonderful evening.  The first stop along the way was at the Keeney’s in South Broadview Estates, Newburgh for a delicious pork loin dinner with a wonderful variety of vegetables, salads and deserts.  Then the road led to the Newburgh First Christian Church, who hosted the staging of “The Wizard of Oz.”  Warrick’s Castle High School Auditorium is under construction, so for the second consecutive year First Christian has hosted the annual summer musical.  All were treated to a well staged, a well performed and a well produced show.  We were especially proud that Ben Boyer (St. Paul’s Choirmaster) was the show’s Vocal Director.  Also, we were very proud to have Amanda Jones and  Chris Jones in the orchestra.  The Eastside Dinner Club gathers monthly.  Please watch for the announcement of their next event.

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Order of St. Andrew Outing

June 21, 2010 Evansville, IN  Cool, refreshing tall drinks and tall stories were shared by the men of the Order of St. Andrew as they gathered at Turoni’s on Monday, June 21st to share pizza and beverages.  After everyone was sufficiently fed, it was off to Bosse field for the Otters’ game.  Chris Peters, the Otters’ starting pitcher, did well, but he was followed by a bullpen disaster as the Grizzlies defeated the Otters 8 – 2.  Great plays were seen during the game —  diving catches by both outfielders and infielders for both teams, great double plays, and a home run to right field  A few celebrities were in the crowd. Dor Doty had his picture taken with Evan.  To a person, the men tell how they enjoyed themselves and hope more will join them at future events.  Contact Fred Mulfnger for more information (fred.mulfinger@gmail.com).