We spent the next day preparing and organizing for the clinic we would be having the following day. Mary had a decent amount of medicines and supplies there herself, and the team brought over more meds and supplies too.

Counting and packaging meds

We also met and got to know some of our translators, who were mostly teenager/young adult English students from Hubert's class. Hubert, on top of pastoring the church there, has about 20 Khmer students who he teaches English to, and he uses this as an opportunity to tell them about Christ. Several of the translators were Christians, but some weren't, so the opportunity for them to translate not only helped them work on their English, but also hear the gospel. Hubert had us share our testimonies of salvation with his students, and he then quizzed them on language comprehension to see if they understood what we were saying.

Hubert teaching English to some of his students

Making friends with some of our translators

The Khmer there weren't the only ones who were working on their language learning though! Our team had a language session where we went over some basic Khmer greetings and useful phrases, and our Khmer friends taught us words too. The Khmer language is very different from English; the letters look nothing like English letters, the sounds are very different, and all words are not divided by spaces. To help us learn how to pronounce words, we wrote out different word pronunciations in English.

This isn't how the words are written in Khmer, but this is how we wrote them out phonetically in English to help us learn

One of the many things I liked about the Khmer culture is how friendly and respectful everyone seemed. When you meet someone, regardless of how well you know them, you greet them with a Khmer phrase saying hello, and as you do this you place your palms together in front of your face, smile, and nod slightly. Not only this, but nearly everyone I met said "thank you" whenever something was done for them. We Americans can definitely learn a few things about being more polite!

The next day, we loaded everything up and traveled by van on dirt roads to a village about 2 1/2 hours away to do our first clinic. Our clinics were all done working with local health centers, which were small buildings in some of the villages staffed by a couple people with very basic health knowledge (basically, they had some meds they could give you if you needed them, and they could help with child-birthing).

One of the health centers we did a clinic at

Each clinic would begin between 8-9am, and would go until about 4pm, with about a 45 minute break for lunch. When we would arrive to each clinic site, usually a crowd of people would already be waiting there. At the beginning of each clinic, a Christian man named Lalin preached the gospel to the crowd and gave Khmer tracts to everyone.

One of the crowds hearing the gospel

Many of the people had never heard of Jesus before, or what He did for them. Upon learning this, I was very burdened, and couldn't help but think of Romans 10:14: "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?"

My heart ached for these people, who are dying without ever hearing about their Savior.

After the preaching, everyone was registered and then waited patiently to be seen by a physician. No one ever complained about waiting. Our doctors were usually in two or three rooms, and each had a translator with them. The patient would tell the doctor what complaint they had, and then the doctor would obtain a history and physical, and explain the diagnosis and treatment to them. Resources were pretty limited; we could do blood glucose checks, malaria checks, urinalysis, wound care, etc., but if the patient happened to be sicker than what we could take care of with the given resources, we would tell they what was wrong and then tell them they needed to go to the nearest hospital.

Doctors seeing patients

Witnessing to patients

After the patient was done being seen by the doctor, many times the translator would then share the gospel with them. Also, while people waited to be seen by a doctor, we would witness to them. After each patient was seen, they would go to the "pharmacy" we had set up, where we would dispense any prescribed medication to the patient and explain how it was to be taken and why. Not that they believed our medicine to be magical necessarily, but we were told that they believe medicine to be very effective, so we made sure everyone left with something- if nothing else, a daily multivitamin.

At each clinic, I managed traffic flow, obtained vitals on patients waiting, obtained blood sugars, checked people for malaria, did wound care, got things for the doctors, and other miscellaneous tasks.

Me checking vitals

If I wasn't doing anything else, a Khmer young man named Somphors and I witnessed to people waiting.

Somphors and I

Somphors told me he was saved near the end of 2014, so he'd only been a Christian a couple months. This being said, he would actively walk up to people and begin witnessing to them. This was very challenging for me to see, as I have been saved for 19 year and don't witness with that level of boldness.

Most of the patients had fairly common complaints, but a few were very sick, including a young man with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a serious disease where the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system, causing ascending paralysis (this becomes a problem if it reaches the diaphragm and you can no longer breathe). This is one of the cases where we had to tell the patient and family that they had to get to the nearest hospital ASAP because we didn't have the necessary medical equipment there.

Patient with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, who could no longer walk at the time of this picture

This and other experiences I had yet to have on the trip developed a deep appreciation for our health care system here in the U.S. Many of our patients came by foot, and one woman came by boat on a three hour trip, and showed up right when we were closing the clinic down for the day. Needless to say, we saw her anyway, and she ended up having malaria and receiving treatment.

In total, the first day we saw 103 patients, and all heard the gospel. Needless to say, we all went to bed early and slept well that night.