St. Martin's Episcopal Church Outreach Blog

World Malaria Day: U.N. Effort

 

UN Global Campaign To Fight Malaria

Appeals For $3.2 Billion

To Reach 'Near-Zero' Malaria Deaths0

 

 

    Although not mentioned directly by the Reverend Lauren Stanley over the past weekend when St. Martins focused on ERD (Episcopal Relief and Development) and Missions, this Wednesday (April 25) is World Malaria Day.  

We did, however talk about the efforts of the Episcopal Church to do its small part in the global attempt to erradicate malaria.    Below is an article today from the Huffington Report about the UN's efforts and very positive information that should make us stand a little taller.   

    Remember, as Reverend Stanley told us, "these are OUR Children".

UNITED NATIONS — The global campaign to fight malaria is appealing for $3.2 billion to try to reach the U.N. goal of "near-zero" deaths from the mosquito-borne disease by 2015.
There has been "great progress" in reducing malaria deaths using bednets, insecticide spray and drugs, said Ray Chambers, the U.N. secretary-general's special envoy for malaria.

He cited a World Health Organization report in December, which used figures from 2010, saying malaria deaths had decreased by over one-third. Since then, he said at a news conference Monday, the world has delivered 160 million additional bednets "so we expect the number of deaths to be much less now."

Chambers said that in the last six years, the campaign to fight malaria has raised over $6 billion.
"Now we have to raise $3.2 billion to get us to the point of having a chance to be at near zero deaths by 2015," he added.

Princess Astrid of Belgium, a special representative for the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, told the press conference ahead of World Malaria Day on Wednesday that 90 percent of malaria cases occur in Africa.

"Every time I meet patients, my main message is malaria is preventable and treatable but prevention and treatment require tremendous efforts and funding," she said.

"These are YOUR Children"

     The Reverend Lauren Stanley, an Episcopal priest from the Diocese of Virginia and representing ERD (Episcopal Relief and Development), spoke Saturday night, April 21, at St. Martin's to a large and enthusiastic group of parishioners at a potluck.    She spoke passionately of her work in Southern Sudan and in Haiti, following the earthquake.    She encouraged us all to be active in mission work -  "these are not just the children of Haiti or Sudan, they are YOUR children".    The Reverend Stanley spoke again at all three services on the following Sunday.

 

    One way we can be involved, Reverend Stanley pointed out,  is by our donations which will go to the purchase of mosquito-netting to protect sleeping children and adults from mosquitos that carry the deadly virus of malaria.   In the tropics where the disease is endemic, children under five are particularly vulnerable and usually die when infected.  Netting used with the young is particularly effective in giving them a headstart and getting them past the vulnerable period of early childhood.    Money for this project has been recently collected at SM and we will continue - so it's not too late to help.  Look at the Outreach section of the kiosk in the narthex, please notice the information about ERD and the NetsforLife® Inspirational Fund. 

 

     Reverend Stanley has a special connection with St. Martins because our own rector, Shirley Smith-Graham, early in her career and training worked in Southern Sudan with her.   We are fortunate to have this opportunity to hear her on in our parish. 

                                              

                                                  Reverend Lauren Stanley

 

 

 

 

 

                         

 

                                        

 

       

 

 

 

    The program closed with Psalm 139:

 

                                Psalm 139

1. O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.

2. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. 

3. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

4. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.

 5. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.

6. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.

7. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

 8. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

 9. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

 10. Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

11. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

 12. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

 13. For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.

14. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

15. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

16. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

17. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!

18. If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.

19. Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.

20. For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.

21. Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?

22. I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

23. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:

24. And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. 

 

    If you have any questions or would like further information, please call Carolyn Ramage at 757-253-2203 or Helen Smith at 757-220-0326.   Many thanks to these two and all of the other people who made this wonderful event occur.   Other sources of information are also posted in this blog.

 

An Evening Potluck: Nets for Life with the Reverend Lauren Stanley

                                              Pot Luck Supper Event 

                                              Saturday, April 21, 2012

                                                       at 5:00 P.M.

 

                Bring your favorite dish to share and join us in Miles Hall.

                                            Childcare will be provided.

                                                  

Episcopal Relief & Development (ERD) – Sunday, April 22nd

NetsforLife® Inspiration Fund

     Have you seen this yet?  With all there is to see and people to talk with as you enter or exit the church, you may have missed it.  On the Outreach section of the kiosk in the narthex, please notice the information about ERD and the NetsforLife® Inspirational Fund.  St. Martin’s will earmark this year’s collection on Sunday, April 22^nd to NetsforLife® which provides mosquito netting to countries in Africa where malaria is rampant.

 

    Leading up to ERD Sunday, there’s lots going on.  ERD has age-appropriate children’s lessons on what malaria is and how it’s prevented.  Children will be able to touch and feel the mosquito netting and learn how St. Martin’s is at work even as far away as in Africa to provide these nets which will save children’s lives. On Saturday evening, April 21^st at 5:00pm, The Reverend Lauren Stanley will be speaking at a potluck parish dinner in Miles Hall about The Episcopal Church’s world mission. Child care will be provided at this dinner. 

 

                                          

    The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley, the special guest for this special weekend, is an Episcopal priest of the Diocese of Virginia who serves as a preacher, celebrant, retreat leader and consultant. She was an Appointed Missionary of The Episcopal Church for five years, serving most recently in the Diocese of Haiti, the largest diocese in the Church. Before to serving in Haiti, she spent four years (2005-2009) as the Episcopal Church's only full-time missionary in Sudan, where she taught and was chaplain at the Renk Theological College in South Sudan. A graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary (1997), she served as numerous parishes in the Dioceses of Virginia and Bethlehem (Pa.), specializing in mission work both domestic and foreign before becoming a full-time missionary.

    She is the author of the Diocese of Virginia’s Short-Term Mission Handbook; the January 2010 Forward Day by Day meditations; a contributor to Walking with God Day by Day and Wisdom Found: Stories of Women Transfigured by Faith, and is a national newspaper columnist writing about God's presence in our lives. Her web site is www.gointheworld.net. Before ordination, Stanley was a journalist for 20-plus years, as well as a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Kenya in the mid-1980s. 

 

    Please consider supporting this life-saving work.  On Sunday, April 15^th, envelopes will be placed in the bulletin for this special in-gathering which will occur the following Sunday, April 22nd.  By making your check payable to St. Martin’s Church and designating “ERD – NetsforLife” on the check memo line, we will send one check from our parish designated for this malaria prevention initiative.  If you won’t be in attendance on ERD Sunday, you may submit your check to St. Martin’s prior to the collection date using the same notation on the check memo line.  A $12 contribution provides not only a net but also an integrated approach to malaria prevention. 

 

About Episcopal Relief & Development and NetsforLife®

Episcopal Relief & Development is the international relief and development agency of the Episcopal Church. The agency works with worldwide partners in the Anglican Communion in more than 40 countries. Its programs help people address root causes of poverty through overcoming disaster, alleviating hunger, creating economic opportunities, strengthening communities and promoting health and fighting disease. 

 

    One of the important ways in which Episcopal Relief & Development fights disease is through its NetsforLife® program partnership to prevent malaria. A deadly disease transmitted by mosquitoes, malaria kills one child each minute in sub-Saharan Africa.  NetsforLife® works to save lives by delivering insecticide-treated mosquito nets and training in malaria prevention to communities in 17 African countries.   

 

 

Moving Whole Communities from Sickness to Strength

    Every 45 seconds in sub-Saharan Africa, a child dies from malaria, a deadly infectious disease transmitted by a mosquito bite. Just one life-saving, long lasting insecticide-treated net can save two lives from suffering and death.

    Since 2008, NetsforLife® has delivered over 5.6 million nets across 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa resulting in less sickness, fewer deaths and stronger communities. By partnering with churches and faith-based groups in remote communities,NetsforLife® combats malaria by training community agents to deliver life-saving nets, educating community members about proper net use and maintenance, and providing on-going monitoring and evaluation of net use.

    JOIN US! Working at the grassroots level within the Episcopal community, the Inspiration Fund will help NetsforLife® deliver upon its promise to distribute 7 million nets by 2013. Combined with education and training, this work will better more than 37 million lives across the continent.

 

Visit the NetsforLife® Inspiration Fund Resource Page for tools to help you educate your community in the fight against malaria!

 

Please pray for the people of Africa using your own words or those of Rt. Rev. Trevor Huddleston.

                    God bless Africa,

                    Guard her people,

                    Guide her leaders,

                    And give her peace.

 

    If you have any questions or would like further information, please call Carolyn Ramage at 757-253-2203 or Helen Smith at 757-220-0326. If you would like to RSVP for the April 21st parish potluck event, please email us at erdevent@stmartinswmbg.org!

 

 

 

   Much more of this work can be found on the blog, Mission in the 21st Century, a website sponsored by the Virginia Theological Seminary Missionary Society.  Here is an entry on that blog and you can also reat the entire interview there.

. 

                  Interview with a Missionary: Lauren Stanley, Part 1

 

Let’s start with the basics, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your experience as a Missionary?

LS: I began serving as an Appointed Missionary of The Episcopal Church on 4 July 2005, when I moved to Renk, Sudan (now South Sudan). Then-Bishop of Renk Daniel Deng Bul, whom I had met in my senior year at VTS when he was studying there, asked me to come to Sudan to help build the Renk Bible School into a theological college. He also asked me to do development work. At Renk, I taught Introduction to Christian Theology, New Testament, Old Testament, Homiletics, Financial Management, the Doctrine of God, Development, and so many English classes it wasn’t even funny(some for the students, some for the community, with special classes for the women in the community). I also wrote extensively about the Church in Sudan, in newspaper columns in the US 

 

                        

 

 

I served in Renk for four years, but never continuously. The Government of Sudan had been labeled a “state sponsor of terrorism” by the United States, meaning relationships between the two countries were not good. My initial visa was only good for three months. I then began going back and forth between Sudan and the US, usually in three-month increments (although I did receive a residency visa, which allowed me to stay for six months at one point). Because of the tensions between North and South Sudan, I was pulled out of Renk in October 2007, after spending seven weeks under house arrest for my own safety and the safety of the Episcopal Church of Sudan. I returned to Sudan in August 2008 for one month, came back to the US, and then was finally able to go back to Sudan for three months at a time.

In February 2009 I ended my work in Sudan and came back to the United States, and shortly after was asked to serve as an Appointed Missionary of The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Haiti.

I arrived in Haiti in late August 2009, and served as a missionary there for nearly a year. I worked for Bishop Jean Zache Duracin as assistant in the Partnership Program, helped with development, and wrote about the Church in Haiti in my newspaper columns. I traveled around the country, and spent almost all of my time working with and for the partners.

I was not in Haiti during the earthquake; I actually was at VTS working on my Doctor of Ministry program that day. After the earthquake, I served as assistant to the Bishop, traveling back and forth to Haiti and all over the United States, telling the story of the people and Church in Haiti, raising funds, setting up new partnerships and trying to keep Haiti on the front pages of people’s hearts.

I still work on behalf of both Sudan and Haiti, including doing mission training, advising on partnerships, and telling the story of our faithful brothers and sisters in Christ around the world.

Wow! So what are the biggest challenges you have seen working in the Mission field?

LS: The biggest challenge to actually engaging in mission is that the Church cannot seem to agree on what “mission” means. We are the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. And yet, people are surprised to learn that we actually have missionaries! We talk about “mission” all the time, and we are nowhere near being on the same page as to what it means, or how we are to carry it out.

Mission, as I said above, is the reason for which we are created. It is not outreach. It is not something we do outside our regular communities. It is not something we do part-time, or leave others to do it. All Episcopalians are, by definition, missionaries. And since we are created in God’s image, which means that we are created for mission, our whole lives should be centered in this. Every person we meet, every action we take, every action we don’t take … needs to be focused in and through God. That’s mission.

Our challenge as a Church is that we are not talking about mission in this way, we are not encouraging, teaching, preaching mission this way, we are not doing mission this way. Instead, we fumble about as though the definition of mission were a grand mystery. It’s not. Jesus explained it quite well: Love one another as I have loved you. Full stop.

So … we need to recognize that we are confused about mission, stop being confused, and get on with loving in wild, radical, inexplicable and eternal ways. We need to make everything we do, say, think, pray begin with God. Play this out in any arena and see what it leads to – the world God desires for us.

Has technology helped or hindered work in the field of mission?

Technology is a gift from God! Truly … because it means the story can be told in bold, new, incredibly quick ways. It means relationships can be built across the world using email and social networks. It means that people whose stories have never or rarely been heard can now tell their stories, can now be recognized as real sisters and brothers in Christ, related not by the blood of their birth but by the waters of their baptism. Missionaries help facilitate all this through the technology … making the connections, telling the stories, making the movies.

The proliferation includes mobile phones — in most countries, the systems actually are faster and more up-to-date than ours, because companies are installing the newest and latest technology as they go — internet connections even in the middle of nowhere, and Skype connections.

With technology spreading as quickly as it is throughout the world, relationships are blossoming, thus making it even more possible to live more fully into imago Dei (to wit, we are created by God in God’s image in love and community [the first images of God] to live in love and community. Being created in love and community is the how of our creation.Living in love and community is the why of our creation. Thus, it is our mission in life, the very reason for which God created us.)

"Princess Basma" Christmas Eve Donation

 

  The Christmas Eve "loose change" donations from St. Martin's Collection Plate this year went this year to an organization in East Jerusalem supported by the Episcopal Church of America.   Some background information for us on the Princess Basma Centre is provided below by the AFEDJ:

December  2011 Princess Basma Centre    needs your help      This is urgent                 We've never made an emergency request for one Diocesan institution before.  But the need is urgent.  Please, please do what you can to help Princess Basma Centre maintain its programs.  We're asking you to consider a special gift to make up for the funds which have been withheld or defunded by USAID, the Israeli government and other sources as a result of the Palestinian bid for UN membership.  As the only regional referral center for physically and mentally disabled children, Princess Basma is a critical resource for families of all faith and ethnic traditions       The AFEDJ (American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem is an independent, non-political 501c3 which helps sustain the humanitarian institutions of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem -- schools, hospitals and institutes for the disabled. All contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Diocesan institutions foster mutual respect and tolerance in a land torn by turmoil and poverty. Learn more about the work of the AFEDJ or the Diocese of Jerusalem. Visit the AFEDJ website to learn about or contribute to any of the important work done in the region.     The Diocese of Jerusalem covers five countries and is home to almost thirty parishes. Our healthcare and education ministries are active and growing across the region with the provision of hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation centers, and schools. Alongside these ministries the Diocesan Peace and Reconciliation department continues to work at strengthening the interfaith dialogue with our fellow Jews and Muslims. Our Kids4Peace programme in turn strives to educate the next generation in a language of tolerance and acceptance.     Betty Majaj, Director of the Princess Basma Centre in East Jerusalem, sent an urgent message advising us that she faces a $200,000 deficit this year, cannot meet payroll, has shut down their outreach program and is evaluating which departments may have to be closed.  They have already drained the hydrotherapy pool and developed contingency plans.

What is the Princess Basma Centre?

    The Jerusalem Princess Basma Centre located in East Jerusalem was founded in 1965. It is a comprehensive national referral center for the evaluation, rehabilitation, and education of children and adults with special needs, and for the support and education of their families. Historically, the Center has focused on special physical needs, but recently a new and innovative program has begun for children with autistic disorders. In addition to these services to patients, the Center has become a powerful voice of advocacy in the region for people with special needs.

 

   Most recently, the Centre also now houses the Diocesan Healthcare Research Center under Dr. Hisham Nassar’s leadership; the Research Centre is named in honor of the late Dr. Amin Saleh Majaj. The Jerusalem Princess Basma Centre was a pioneer in establishing the first inclusive education school on its premises in 1987.

    East Jerusalem or Eastern Jerusalem refer to the parts of Jerusalem captured and annexed by Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and then captured and annexed by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.   It includes Jerusalem's Old City and some of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such as the Temple Mount, Western Wall, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

 

    The term "East Jerusalem" may refer to either the area under Jordanian rule between 1949 and 1967 which was incorporated into the municipality of Jerusalem after 1967, covering some 70 km² (27 sq mi) (much of which is geographically north and south of the city center as well as east), or the territory of the pre-1967 Jordanian controlled part of the Jerusalem municipality, covering 6.4 km² (2.5 sq mi) (only geographically east of the city center, mainly the predominantly Arab business district, the Old City and surrounding neighborhoods).

    East Jerusalem is the proclaimed capital of the proposed Palestine^[1] although Ramallah serves as the administrative capital. Israel has declared all of Jerusalem, both East and West sections, as its undivided eternal capital.