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Share The Harvest
Educating Jungle Children
Quito, Ecuador -- With a desire to share international missions experience with her students, nursing instructor Kathryn Smith began a cross-cultural nursing course at Hillsborough Community College in Plant City, Florida. For two weeks this past summer, the class compared Ecuador's nursing practices, nursing education and hospitals to the United States. They also were able to bring health education and over 7,000 Operation Blessing donated vitamins to children living in Ecuadorian jungle shacks.
An adventurous group of fifteen women piled out of the canoes. The Rio Napo River, a part of the Amazon waterway, had treated the American nursing students and their professor well while traveling to remote villages only assessable by its waters. Little dwellings waited behind the jungle's lush vegetation. Their young inhabitants, who are often plauged by malnutrition and disease, were excited to see what these visitors had brought them.
The Operation Blessing supported nursing team taught the children essential health and hygiene practices that will decrease infection, tapeworm and parasitic disease that shorten the lifespan of many people around the world. Children learned how to properly wash their hands before a meal and after using the restroom, brush their teeth, the importance of eating nutritious food as well as wearing shoes. These seemingly simple lessons are often unheard of in developing countries where day-to-day survival is almost impossible. By washing their hands and wearing shoes, commonplace colds, infections, various other sicknesses and injuries will not as often become life-threatening situations. This is critically important to these families who do not have access to basic medical care.
More than two hundred children in three villages attended the health education classes. They also received a health related coloring book, a plastic bag of basic school supplies, and a month's worth of vitamins. One nursing student commented, "I found it amazing that the children living in the jungle villages all had smiles, laughed, and played just as the children do in the United States. Those I witnessed are not poor in spirit as many families I have come in contact with here at home."
Another shared, "This experience has given me more confidence as well as asserted my desire to be a nurse and provide holistic care."
Operation Blessing strives to meet the immediate needs of those living in poverty around the world, but then takes it a step further by encouraging education and training programs. Fifty percent of Ecuador's population of over thirteen million live below the poverty line. These nursing students saw just a glimpse of the need. In turn they made a long-term positive impact by taking time to share a little of their knowledge with children they probably will never see again.
Your gift towards Operation Blessing's many programs tells the many struggling individuals and families of this world, somebody cares.
Please give now!
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