Greetings to my sponsoring churches!
    The best thing about being back in Liberia is worshiping at St. Luke's. The services are long but because of the wonderful music and the singing and dancing it is OK. I enjoy that so much. My first Sunday back, the pastor was away so I was drafted to lead the liturgy.  The next Sunday I got to preach and since I had not had a chance to preach since January, I was happy to do
it.
    The hours we have electricity have been cut because of continuing problems with the generator and cost of fuel to run it. Most days the power in the hospital goes off at 9 a.m.! There are still problems with the water supply and my shower doesn't work most of the time. Then I have to resort to a "bucket bath."  That is nothing unusual, I take a bucket bath in India to
conserve water.
    One day, there was a little excitement in the "executive washroom" - I went to wash my hands and couldn't find the container used to dip water out of the larger storage container. I saw something floating in that larger container and started to reach for it only to realize that it was a swimming rat!
    We have been having a lot of night time storms but one morning after a dry night, the carport was covered with termites and children were collecting them for food. I was told they can be eaten fried or raw.  Snack anyone?
    We are working on setting up a dental clinic at Phebe and have a promise from a missionary dentist in Monrovia to come and work there a day or two a month. We are also going to send a nurse to train as a  Dental Nurse Practitioner. She will be able to do fillings and extractions and even simple root canals. We also hope to send someone to school to become a dentist. We got a shipment containing dental equipment but it seemed the air compressor was missing. It seems to have been diverted to the maintenance warehouse so we will be able to get it back. The dental chair is very heavy and we will need a forklift to move it!
    While we have the forklift, I hope we can also move the portable X-ray machine which was in the same warehouse. Somehow, one of its tires had disintegrated en route so we took that tire off and had something made to replace it so it will actually be portable. It took and year and a half to
get it here so I guess its arrival couldn't be without problems! It's also very heavy and the forklift will be needed to get it out of the warehouse.
    While I am in Liberia I will also be helping out at Curran which is the other Lutheran hospital located in the city of Zorzor. I have made a couple of trips there so far.  Zorzor is about 75 miles from Phebe and the road seems in better shape than it was two years ago. They have reliable
generators but limited fuel supply for them so their power schedule is 12 noon to 4 p.m. and then again around 6:30 p.m. until midnight. It isn't as hot there as at Phebe, but it is hard to sleep without a fan at night, so I got a battery operated fan to take along when I go there. Curran has a
midwife school and have a large group in their first class - about 36. It will be a challenge to get them enough clinical experience as more and more women are delivering at clinics and health centers where there is no cost. Some of their clinical experience will be in those clinics - where they will end up after graduation.
    One day I visited Ganta and the Ganta Methodist Hospital where I met the American missionary who runs the Ganta Hospital School of Nursing and also met a young man who did the Dental Nurse Practitioner course to which we plan to send the Phebe nurse. I got some insight into this six month course and he offered to orient our nurse which could be very helpful.
    There is so much to be done here, and it is good to be able to spend my time finding ways to do some of those things rather than spending all my time trying to keep the generators and the water running! Please pray for the people of Phebe and Curran Hospitals. And please pray for me because your prayers are the fuel that keeps my generator running! Rev. John Lunn


May 2009
                    
      	Greeting to my sponsoring churches! As I conclude my days in Liberia - for this year - I continue to meet more interesting and helpful people who are doing good things for this country. For instance, I met with the head of the Dental Department at the JFK Hospital in Monrovia. She is a returning Liberian - she left during the war years and even though she had established a dental practice in the US, decided to go back and help Liberia rebuild. She may be retired but is very enrgetic and determined. She is trying to do something about the oral health of her people as well as doing her part in addressing the corruption and complacency that have resulted from the years of violence and terror. A small but growing group is working on local training and development of Dental Clinics - we hope for one in Phebe soon and Curran later.
	I am still working on the idea of getting Religious Sisters who are also nurses to come to Phebe. One of the reasons I am so passionate about this is that the people here have lost so much. Years of war have affected wells of compassion and I trust that the monsoon of love that Religious Sisters would bring could replenish those well.  
	My church here - St. Luke's - had such an amazing worship service on Palm Sunday! We processed in waving palm branches and singing something in Kpelle. There were three choirs - all good - and dancing pastors and a fine sermon from a Methodist seminary professor who is married to one of our Lutheran pastors. He teaches at the Gbarnga School of Theology which is
still where Lutherans go for their theological degrees. It was very hot during the service and I was able to offer a cup of cold water - in Jesus' name - to the poor preacher who was wearing a suit and tie!
	Easter morning was sultry as well. The service was good but not quite as inspiring as the Palm Sunday worship. I preached a sermon about expectations and surprises. The people expected their Messiah to be a king and they got a humble savior. The disciples expected the usual Seder meal and got their feet washed. They expected a last minute rescue or miracle and got a crucifixion, they expected a dead body in the tomb and got a resurrection. And they expected the authorities to come and arrest them but they got a visit from the risen Lord. God is a God of surprises! 
 	One of the young men who works at Phebe is going to be going to school in Ghana to become a Biomedical Engineer. The he will be able to maintain and repair hospital equipment. That will make him a valuable asset to the hospital!  The program is awaiting accreditation. 
	I made a couple of trips to Monrovia to meet with people about the dental clinic and to meet with others about starting a Masters in Nursing program. When I am there, I stay at the guest house of the Lutheran Church of Liberia but I like to go to the Royal Hotel pancakes at breakfast time and pizza the rest of the day.  We are making some progress with the Masters in Nursing program and have received a positive nod from the Ministry of Health and the Clinton Foundation as well as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)  - they may be able to provide the funding we need. Now I have to recruit faculty. That won't be easy but it feels right. I've had some positive responses from people who really want to help. We hope to have this program ready to go in August or September of 2010.
	As I write this, I am in Tanzania and will be visiting Kenya too before I go back to India. I will be back at Phebe in 10 months but will continue to work on these programs via email and maybe a recruiting trip. Please keep the people of Phebe and Curran Hospitals in your prayers and also the dental clinic and maters program we hope to begin. And don't forget to mention me! Your prayers are vital to my work.

      Rev. John Lunn



June 2009
    
                              
          Greetings to my sponsoring churches! I ended April with stops in Tanzania and Kenya. In Kenya, I stayed in the Benedictine Brothers' Guesthouse which was a comfortable place with running water and mostly 24/7 electricity. The Sisters there are part of an order that I have worked with in India, but the novices and postulants are all from Tanzania or other countries in Africa. I would very much like them to send some of the sisters to help at Phebe Hospital in Liberia, but nothing has been settled yet. Then I went to Kenya and stayed in a very nice guesthouse at the Convent there. This order is also from India and I enjoyed some excellent South Indian food while I was there. The administrator of the 200 bed hospital was a classmate
of mine at CORAT (Christian Organizations Research and Advisory Trust) and may be able to help me get the help I feel Phebe needs. There were five other Americans visiting the hospital - a Presbyterian group from Virginia who have been supporting the hospital for years. It is wonderful to see this kind of ecumenicism!
    The weather in Kenya was very cool - downright cold after the heat of Liberia - so I am having to get re-acclimated to the heat of Vellore.  May  is probably the hottest month of all there and the favorite month for people to vacation away from southern India. When I got off the plane, it was around 100 degrees and that was at 9 p.m.! There were power cuts from 6-8 a.m. which really did not work well for me, but no one asked me what times would be more convenient for me! I do have an inverter so I can use my fan and that is a life saver. The day after I got back, the temperature topped out at nearly 110 degrees, and they tell me there are hotter days to come.
When a thunderstorm comes along, the heat usually breaks for a while. But not for long! The day I went for a haircut, there was a power cut so there was no A/C and the barber did not need to use the water bottle to wet my hair - I managed to get it wet all by myself.
    At one point this past month, I felt like my computer had turned on me and I had totally lost my touch with it. But if you are going to have computer problems, Vellore is a great place to have them. They fixed my laptop and reinstalled all the programs for only 800 rupees - that's about $16. If you have ever had to reinstall all your programs, you know how much time (and frustration) they saved me.
    It seems to me that I have gotten more done for Phebe now that I am not the actual administrator and do not have to handle the daily struggles with running water and the generators. Speaking of Phebe's generators, right about now the generator people ought to be there putting the new engine in the large generator. It only took a few months more than a year! But the dental clinic I worked on while I was at Phebe this year is a working reality now! I had an email from one of the dentists and they had moved the equipment in and have started doing dental work. Sometimes things do actually happen!
    I have been working on making a recruiting trip to the USA to find some volunteer teachers for the Masters in Nursing Education program I hope to set up at Phebe. I have possible candidates in the New York area and also in the Midwest. I will also be recruiting here in India.  I'm looking for people with a PhD in Nursing or Education willing to spend a semester (14
weeks) in Liberia. 
    There is a lot of work to be done and your prayers are the fuel I need to give me the energy to do my part. Please remember me in your prayers and be sure to mention me by name!


July 2009
  
	Greetings to my sponsoring churches! It's still hot in India and we are back to power cuts. The power is off from 6-8 a.m. which is bad for me. In my room it's okay because I have a fan that runs on batteries, but I like to eat breakfast in dining room with my colleagues and since they don't feel the heat (they've lived with it all their lives), the windows are closed and there is no air moving. But that's life and it is much better than Liberia where there is no power all day at home. With the monsoons, it should cool off a bit but with the heat I have to really work at being motivated.
    Three of us - a chaplain, a nun, and I - went to Ernakulam in Kerala which is south of Vellore to do some training with a church based palliative care program. The train trip was supposed to take 9 ½ hours, but there was a 4 ½ hour delay due to the track being blocked by an express train that derailed after hitting two elephants - a mother and her calf. It ended up being a very long time on the train but we had bunks where we could sleep and we could walk around and even get off the train when it stopped at a
station for a few minutes. We did some home visits with the volunteer team. They are non-medical team but they are very dedicated and are able to do a lot for the patients including helping them financially.
    In an effort to motivate myself, I started working on a project that I have been considering for a long time. My idea is to look at grief and bereavement from the perspective of the Way of the Cross. An artist friend would do paintings to illustrate it and it would be interactive. I'm going to call it "Dying to be Healed."
    We did a 24 hour retreat for part of the palliative care team and I was leading it so I decided to show the movie "The Bucket List" and tie that into the idea of making lists of what we want to do as a team and as a program and as individuals. The volume would not crank up enough so we couldn't hear it very well and subtitles would have been nice. We stopped at one point and I sort of summarized what was happening. Everyone got the gist of it and the point I wanted to make. We all made Bucket Lists for Palliative
Care and for ourselves. Our Sunday morning service was simple as was my message. I talked about Jesus crying when he heard of the death of his friend Lazarus and how that gives us permission to express our emotions. "Don't cry" is not valid in the light of Jesus' message.
    I took a few days off to go to Hyderabad to spend time with a good friend. We did some touristy things like visiting a famous and historic place called Charminar where there is a tower that was built as a charm to ward off a deadly epidemic back in the 16th century.  We also went to the Salar Jung Museum which houses art objects from all around the world, all collected in the early 20th century by one man - Salar Jung III.  From there we came back into the 21st century with an IMAX 3D movie and lunch at McDonalds.
    On Fathers' Day, I got to do a baby blessing for the new daughter of two chaplain friends of mine. This blessing is done before baptism, and I mentioned to the congregation that I did a lot of baby blessings in Liberia but this was only the second one I had done in five years at Christ Lutheran - my church in Vellore. I suggested that they "get busy" - but with this congregation, it is more likely to be grandchildren!
	I am still working on finding professors with PhDs who will volunteer to teach in a Masters program for Nursing Education in Liberia. I am using emails and phone calls now and then I'll be in US to try to recruit these nurse-professors but will not be able to visit my sponsoring churches on this visit - that will happen next year. Until then, please keep me in your prayers along with
the people I work with and for. I really do depend on your prayer support to keep me going.


August 2009  
                                            
      	Greetings to my sponsoring churches and thank you for keeping me in your prayers. At the suggestion of one of the churches, I now have a web page where you can see some photos and catch up with any newsletters you might have missed. If you have a question for me, I also have an email address for you to use. It's revlunn@zionmilaca.org
	At the end of June, with some funding from ELCA Global Mission, we sponsored a workshop called "The Sacred Art of Living and Dying." Richard Groves, from The Sacred Art of Living Center in Bend, OR was the workshop presenter.  It was an excellent workshop – where participants gained some new and wonderful insights.  Richard went with our Palliative Care Team on some home visits and was overwhelmed by the conditions our patients live in. Richard will be a good resource for me not only because he is very eager to be involved with our work and future training, but also because he may be able to help recruit faculty for the nursing education program in Liberia that I told you about last month. He will also be a asset for me as I work on my idea of training Spiritual Directors which I also wrote about last month. He also did a workshop for about 15 of the local pastors in Chennai which is where the airport is and where Richard arrived and left.
	I decided that it was time that I had a Master's degree in Palliative Care since it is what I do! I looked into programs that would allow me to complete the work online - distance learning - and found one in Cardiff, Wales. Many of my colleagues from India have done this program.  The ELCA Global Mission approved the program and Cardiff accepted me, so I will be getting out my notebooks and sharpening up my #2 pencils in the late fall when I return from my recruiting trip to the US.
	In mid-July I attended my first Muslim wedding. It was the wedding of my friend Basha's daughter - he runs a medicine shop where we used to get some of our Palliative Care medications. At this wedding, the groom is the one with the flowers - he is fully covered with garland from head to toe. The public part of the ceremony centers around the groom signing the wedding certificate and saying something like "I marry her" three times. There were 700 people at the wedding and Basha fed them all. My friends - two Lutheran chaplains - had 5,000 people at their various wedding dinners and fed them all.  Jesus was certainly present at their wedding, but I don't think he did the catering!
	On July 17th, we celebrated the second anniversary of the hospice at Sneha Deepam. The first two patients were admitted two years ago on that day, and in the past six months, things have really come together. Now there are never less than five patients and often eight or ten. We could technically accommodate up to 50 patients but a more realistic top number would be 25-30. Some of the staff now live in some of the double rooms as do the two Sisters. Mostly we use the two wards - each with eight beds - and a couple of the double rooms for patients who are sicker or patients with families that want privacy.
	The Missionaries of Charity are considering using our training services.  Sister Lourdes who heads the training program teaching nursing skills in Bangalore came to meet with me about sending students to our hospice for palliative care training when we can work out a schedule. I agreed to go to Bangalore and teach her current class of 25 sometime early in August.
	Toward the end of July, I took a road trip to Tirupathur along with one of CMC's psychiatrist - Dr. Anna – to visit a home for about 30 mentally ill men who have been rescued from the streets of Vellore and the surrounding area. All but one are on psychiatric medication now and live quite peacefully in this home. They do small jobs around the place, do some crafts, and go on outings together. A few men have returned home to family and community, some are waiting to be ready to go home, and some don't seem to have anything left of home to go home to. Their illnesses cause a lack of insight and so many are not grateful for what is being done for them. They have forgotten the real horrors of living on the street - eating maybe every three days and being subjected to abuse. The staff doesn't hear "thank you" very often - except maybe from visitors like me.
	Please keep me in your prayers and remember that you are also in mine!


September 2009

	Greetings to my sponsoring churches!
	August was a month of traveling for me - some job related and some vacation related. I began the month flying north to the state of Assam to visit Parkijuli Hospital and then by train to the state of Jharkhand and Mohulpahari Hospital. Then I went by train to Calcutta for a day and a night so I could visit the Missionaries of Charity and finally back to Vellore for a week before leaving for some vacation time in Australia and Malaysia.
	It had been very hot and rainless in Vellore. Nights brought the smell of rain and a jump in humidity, but no rain. It wasn't as hot at Parkijuli, but there was more humidity and less electricity. I made rounds at the hospital with Dr. Iswary and saw several cases of malaria that had affected the brain. I was glad I had started malaria prophylaxis before this trip. The conditions at the hospital are difficult but Dr. Iswary is pretty amazing. He continues to be the only doctor at the hospital but now a friend is going to come three days a week to help out.
	I looked forward to the 14-16 hour train trip to Mohulpahari as the train has A/C. Slight glitch - I got to the train station four hours before the train was due to leave and then the train was two hours late! I spent the first three hours in the First Class Lounge, but then an older fellow asked me to register and proceeded to close the windows and lock the door. The three hours before the train left were very hot and sweaty!
	In Mohulpahari, it was slightly cooler but the electricity was very odd. During the night it seemed to be at about 25% so that my fan made a revolution once a second or so. That doesn't make for chilling, but it did move the air a little. Then the power went out completely and the mosquitos started buzzing around me. They say that mosquitos buzz around your ears to annoy you and raise your blood pressure and thus make your blood more available. That's what they say! There was a bed net, but I would have cooked inside that. The fan did come back on at low speed so I slept a little but I was a bit bitten up in the morning. The next night I put a mosquito coil under the bed. The fumes were a little nasty but that's the price you have to pay for no buzzing and biting! Between my "talks" with the mosquitos, I met with the Medical Superintendent at Mohulpahari who has retired but has stayed on to help out. And there was a wonderful rain shower which lasted about 20 minutes. The drought situation there is dire - this is the first time in 23 years that they haven't had monsoon rains in June or July.
	The train trip to Calcutta was uneventful and I always enjoy the people watching. There are so many different things people snack on and a vendor for every one of those things. There was even a guy giving massages, but he looked a little rough as he pulled hair, bent hands, and banged with his fist! It was good to be in the city with 24 hour a day electricity and mosquitos that were smart enough not to buzz. I had a good visit with the Missionaries of Charity. I met with six sisters - two of them were doctors, one was the Superior General, and the other three were counselors. They even gave me a picture of Mother Teresa (their founder) and a piece of one of her saris.
	Back in Vellore, I had a few days to pack and get ready for my vacation in Australia. One of those days was my birthday on August 15th - India always puts on a very nice show for my birthday as it is also India's Independence Day. On the 16th, we had a church retreat - you can find a link to some photos on my web page - and then I left late evening for a flight to Kuala Lumpur and then to Adelaide, Australia. More about my vacation time in Australia next time. After that, I am back in India for a few days and then on a plane for the USA and my recruiting trip. Please keep me in your prayers as I travel. You are always in mine.


October 2009    
                                                                
      	Greetings to my sponsoring churches! Last month I promised to write a little something about my vacation trip to Australia. I flew to Adelaide and stayed with Graham, a retired chaplain I met while he was volunteering in India. Adelaide is on the southeastern coast of Australia and I could see the ocean from Graham's house. Graham made sure I saw whales and kangaroos and koalas (photos) and we visited the old family farm where Graham's brother and his two sons still live and work. We visited the Australian wine country which is in a heavily German area. One small town of 3,750 had 5 Lutheran churches! We did some shopping - things were very pricey, especially compared with prices in India. But I did buy myself a very Aussie souvenir - a boomerang. I saw a couple of other friends from Vellore who are in Australia for fellowships and made a trip to Melbourne to visit another friend from Vellore. I enjoyed my time off and all the good food - mostly cooked by Graham.
	After my vacation in Australia, I went for a sort of busman's holiday in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. I stayed with a couple who are both graduates of the Christian Medical College in Vellore and I offered to spend time with their palliative care team. They took me up on that offer and I was off on home visits with the nurses. One of the nurses spent a month at Vellore so she was my "work host." She picked me up each day and made sure I got a vegetarian lunch. One day I really ordered the wrong thing! They asked if I wanted "egg noodles" and I said yes, having forgotten what that meant. What it meant was a raw egg broken over the noodles and veggies! 
	We saw some very sad cases on our home visits. One was a woman whose 27 year old son had recently died. She was now being cared for by her 22 year old son who quit his job to be her care giver because his sisters all had jobs that paid better than the job he had. The young man was so isolated and could have benefitted greatly if there had been some young male volunteers available to visit with him. I gave a short talk at their "Bereavement Evening" and shared a bit about the good news and the bad news of grief. The good and the bad news turn out to be the same thing - grief doesn't end.  It's good because it is a sign of love and relationship. The grief keeps the person alive in our hearts and minds. It becomes "good grief" after time and some work on our part. We learn to live without, but with the knowledge that they will always be a part of our lives.
      I also visited the Seminary there one day and spoke with the Counseling Instructor about maybe sending some of his students do some palliative care work and having me teach the End of Life course there. I spent the rest of the day with the palliative care doctor. He had a lot of questions and I tried to give the answers! It was a very good session.
      Then it was back to India and off to Bangalore for classes with 25 sisters from The Missionaries of Charity. I was tired from traveling but the sisters were good students. They already have the spiritual part of palliative care so I concentrated their classes on pain and symptom control. You can see a photo of me with the class of sisters if you visit my web page and go to the photos of India.
      After a few days to unpack, do laundry, and re-pack, I was off to New York City for some nursing educator recruiting at schools there and  in New Jersey as well as a little time with old friends, a visit to my very first parish, and some good New York food. I took a day trip to Boston on the train to see people there too. Then I was off to Chicago to check in with my bosses at ELCA Headquarters and a visit to a college in Indiana. After that I flew to Minnesota and some more recruiting as well as some time with my sisters. From Minnesota, I go to San Diego and then to Hawaii for a little more down time. Then back to New York and finally back to Vellore.
      I have gotten some positive answers from nursing educators and have planted some seeds with others. Maybe, with your prayers and mine, we will get all the positive responses we need to make a Masters in Nursing Education program happen in Liberia!


November 2009

Dear Sponsoring Churches,
	The last time I wrote to you, I was preparing to head for San Diego. While I was there, I visited the San Diego Hospice. It is a wonderful facility which was built on land donated by the widow of the founder of MacDonald's. She provided much of the building money as well. They are on a hill and have a panoramic view of San Diego. They were very helpful and interested in staying in touch and providing help in the future and they shared some of their methods of dealing with end of life issues. I also visited Point Loma Nazarene College where I met a couple of candidates for the nursing education program in Liberia that I have been working on.
	Then I was off to Hawaii where I spent time on Oahu with my friend JP who is a chaplain in Honolulu and also on Kaua`i where I visited with old friends from my time there as a parish pastor. I got to see some of the kids who were three, four, and five when I was there. They have grown up well. If I was going to complain about the weather - and I wouldn't do that because my sisters live in Minnesota - I would just say that the trade winds were not blowing and it was a little warm. Nothing like India in May but a little warm. But I am not complaining!
	The day before I was to leave Hawaii, I discovered that I was flying to San Francisco but my connecting flight to New York was taking off from San Diego! After some scrambling around and some very heartfelt begging, I managed to get a flight from San Francisco to Denver and then to New York City. The last minute changes got me stuck in the middle of a row for part of my trip but I guess somebody has to sit there - and I did get where I was going!
	I had a couple of days in New York and was able to visit the church of one of my seminary classmates, and then I was on the next plane to Chennai, India via Brussels, Belgium. In those few travel days, I crossed 15 1/2 time zones! They say that jet lag takes one day per time zone to go away. It was true!
	As soon as I got back to Sneha Deepam, I had to play travel agent again because Martha, the Liberian nurse who is going to be training in India to become a Dental Nurse Practitioner, had not gotten her visa in time and so needed to postpone her flight to India. I was going to go meet her in Calcutta and travel with her by train to Bihar in the north of India so all those reservations had to be changed.  She came to Chennai and then Vellore instead for a week of adjustment.  I'm getting really good at this travel agent thing, but I think I will keep my day job!
	I was very glad to get back to the weekly Anointing Services and the first one after I returned was very interesting. We somehow started a little early and there were only three people who came forward for prayer. Three pastors and three people wanting prayer. But when we were walking out, we encountered another 30 people! And I may have done my first exorcism! A woman asked me to pray for her because she was possessed by a bad spirit. I prayed, she shook, I prayed a bit more, and she became calm!
	Also when I got back, it was also time to finalize plans with the Missionaries of Charity. Sisters of this order - Mother Teresa's order - will be coming to Sneha Deepam and CMC for some training to help them care for the people they take in from the streets. They are well trained in spiritual care and some nursing care - we hope to be more specific and simple with our training in supportive care and symptom relief. Our theme for this is a quote from their founder, Mother Teresa. She said, "I am interested in persons, not programs.  Programs are for a purpose; but Christian love is for a person, and I am committed to helping persons."
	Please keep us in your prayers and pray that we always remember our commitment to helping persons. And thank you for your support! Rev John Lunn


December 2009
  Greetings to my sponsoring congregations! The last time I wrote to you, we were finalizing plans for sisters from the Missionaries of Charity to come to CMC and Sneha Deepam for training in the more medical areas of palliative care such as pain control and relief of common symptoms. I am happy to say that the training is going well with the first two Sisters. We only had 8-12 patients at Sneha Deepam for them to care for and of course they are used to being much busier, but they agreed that their founder, Mother Teresa, would approve of them spending quality and even quantity time with patients. They spent some time at CMC observing in the dressing room - a place that does up to 80 wound dressings in a morning.
  Good news for us at Sneha Deepam - Father Johnny is buying a generator! It's a challenge here in India to provide power for all the new industry and businesses, so there have been daily power cuts, and once the generator is running, we will have power all day, every day.
  The Fall Monsoon season has come and gone with some heavy rains. Our well at Sneha Deepam has been okay but other areas are running low. The monsoon rains should take care of that, and it is good to see our well filled all the way to the top.
  In my last newsletter, I mentioned Martha, the nurse from Phebe Hospital in Liberia, who has come to India to train as a Dental Nurse Practitioner. I accompanied her to Duncan Hospital in Bihar and it was a long train ride! The hospital is old and they are building a new one but have to wait for funds to finish. The dental clinic is relatively modern and looks clean and bright. There is no one else from Africa there, but there are some foreigner visitors and everyone seems very nice. Martha will train there for six months and when she goes back to Phebe, she'll be able to do normal fillings and extractions. This will mean that patients can be seen on a regular basis and not just once or twice a month when a dentist is able to come.
  Global Health Ministries emailed me to tell me that they are planning to send a container - one of those huge things that gets loaded onto a ship - to India and our Hospice is on the list of those who can order, so one rainy morning, we shopped the GHM warehouse list. If we get most of what we requested, it will be great! Earlier this year we got an oxygen concentrator from them which was a good thing!
  I was invited to visit a Lutheran hospital in Padhar which is in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India. I decided I would stop there on my trip to the Lutheran hospitals farther north that I had visited before. My trip started at 6:30 a.m. at Sneha Deepam and ended in the Padhar guesthouse a little before 10 p.m. and included three takeoffs, three landings, and six hours in cars - a very long day! The hospital is very nice with wonderful landscaping and gardens. This hospital was the first one in rural India to have a cobalt machine to do radiation therapy. They are still using the original machine from 1982. It still works well, but will soon be replaced by a more modern machine. The hospital has 200 beds and is served by 30 doctors - junior and senior - and they cover many specialties. I gave several talks to the doctors about breaking bad news, the importance of presence - of being there with the patient - and total pain management.  I was joined by the daughter of the founder - she's a retired palliative care doctor from the UK. And I spent some time with their palliative care team which consists of a doctor, a nurse, and a chaplain. The chaplain and the doctor are married. We had a good session with lots of good questions and we saw a few patients.
  From there, I went to Kolkata where I stayed in the Lutheran World Relief guesthouse which was a very nice place complete with early morning chai delivered to my door. That's where we'll pick up next time. Until then, please continue to keep me in your prayers and also pray for the palliative care patients in India. Thank you. Rev. John Lunn