It’s always fun to see people’s reactions when we show up to an outing with our “Ebola Lab” cooler.  “Care for a piece of pizza?” “Oooh No!”

The cooler is a souvenir, left over from the 2007 Ebola epidemic in Congo, when, because of our involvement in health project management, we found ourselves caught up in logistic support for a team from CDC.  They’d come to set up a diagnostic lab in Luebo, a mission hospital 700 miles inland, not far from the epidemic’s epicenter.  We forged the way by contacting local authorities, setting up infrastructure- a lab at the hospital and an old missionary home for a guest house, and figuring out electrical power, water, transportation, communications and supply chains in remote, road-less, Congo.  Katherine made several trips to the “hot zone.  When the epidemic subsided before this cooler put was used, we inherited it; a reminder of how the unpredictable can circumvent the usual, and you need to be ready.

With ebola again stalking the continent, we must gear up to be read.  Congo is effectively handling a small outbreak several hundred miles north of us, but we are concerned by the situation in countries to our northwest where Ebola is out of control.  Ebola patients travel, don’t make reservations, are often critically ill and desperate.  Hospitals, health centers and health care workers can be exposed in seconds.  Recently, a man with high fever and nose bleed arrived at the Vanga hospital from the city of Kikwit, 90 miles and a 6 hour drive away.  Having not found help in Kikwit, against all odds, this man’s family made their way to the Vanga hospital.  He’d come the miserable journey in a hot and crowded jeep taxi.  They pushed their way into the crowded emergency room, pressing in on the staff on call.  The man died the next day.  Fortunately, blood samples sent to Kinshasa proved negative for ebola virus.

Ebola is soberingly contagious.   In Congo, where hospitals receive so many poor patients, doctors and nurses are even more vulnerable because we don’t have the luxury of stocking, or disposing of protective gear after each patient.  Where the population earns a dollar a day, we wash and reuse gloves until they wear out.  Patients like this man with the nose bleed, kindle fear in the hearts of even experienced and dedicated health care workers.  Ebola requires far greater stocks of protective gear than hospital budgets can manage.  How can we rise to this challenge?

Thank God for White Cross!  Katherine recently ordered $4500 worth of personal protection equipment using White Cross funds earmarked for buying supplies in Congo.  Who knew, among those who gave to White Cross last year that you would provide critical resources for protecting health care workers in Congo?  God did!   Other gifts will fix up a patient isolation ward at the Vanga hospital.   Who knew what an answer to prayer these resources would be?  God did!  We thank God for the many who support White Cross, who give to support HIV, Ebola, and other health work in Congo, and who give to support Wayne and Katherine so we can be on the ground here at this critical time.

As we rise to this challenge, we are racing against time and need your support.  Will you join our support team?  We think it’s a good investment!  Won’t you also give to the World Mission Offering?  This is a perfect way to rise to the challenge of the unpredictable and the routine to the ends of the earth.