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Global health ministry
By Elizabeth Turner

This time of year, stores are stocked shelf-deep in insect-repelling candles, torches, and sprays. Backyard pavilions come with mesh curtains to tie back or let down. Campers will soon tote Calamine lotion to the muddy reaches of rural sites.

What if there was a shortage this year? What if the West Nile virus went, well, viral, affecting millions of young children in a lethal way? It would be a national crisis. Oprah, the evening news, and the web would buzz about what went wrong and who was to blame.

When seven-year-old Katherine Commale found out a couple of years ago that children her age were dying because they didn’t have mosquito nets around their beds, she decided to do something. In the last two years, she (with the help of her mom Lynda) has collected more than $40,000 to send insecticide-treated sleeping nets to Africa as part of the Nothing But Nets campaign. Katherine was brought on stage during the General Conference in Fort Worth to be recognized for her Christian compassion and humanitarian work. “Thank you for being a witness,” said Bishop John Hopkins, “a model for the rest of us.”

A few days later, basketball teams from the North Texas and Central Texas Annual Conferences played in a tournament at General Conference to raise money for the Nothing But Nets effort. The Hope for Africa Children’s Choir and several bishops were present to cheer on teams and lend support to the fight against malaria. Because of the tournament and other fund raising endeavors, the two conferences have raised $300,000 for the campaign.

From the elementary school student to the local church athletes, the call to foster physical healing around the world grew when Bill Gates Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, addressed delegates. “More than anything, the fight against malaria is going to take a firm commitment to John Wesley’s idea,” he said. “You are 12 million people armed with the conviction that all the world is your parish. That makes you the most powerful weapon there is against malaria.”

Bishop Eben Nhiwatiwa of Zimbabwe thanked Gates and his fellow United Methodists for the bed net generosity. The bishop reported that he had participated in distributing nets in a very small village in his nation. “That village is very far away, but your helping hand has reached there,” he said. Nets that save “tender children are the future of Africa and all of us.”

The United Methodist Church also received a $5 million grant from the United Nations Foundation with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The funds will be used to fight malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis.

But malaria isn’t the only health crisis that the church is working to stave off in the global community. A day-long seminar held before General Conference began featured author Kay Warren, who encouraged United Methodists to minister to HIV/AIDS patients at home and abroad.

“God has a plan, and God intends the church to be the answer,” Warren said in regard to the HIV/AIDS crisis. “The church is the missing link and must take a seat at the table to solve the problem.”

Elizabeth Turner is editorial assistant at Good News.



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