First 3 months of 2009 in South Africa

I arrived back here in South Africa on February 4th my 64th birthday. Arriving a bit tired from the long journey my wife, Beth, picked me up from the airport and brought me immediately to our newly constructed home on Shikwaru Game Lodge. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was sharing my birthday with Moira the office manager of Shikwaru and that neighbors and staff were have a large surprise party for us in our new home. Moira’s husband, Abe Lincoln, the chef on our lodge prepared a wonderful South African braai with tasty pork ribs, lamb, chicken, and beef steak. I was hungry and tired and it was one of the best meals I had enjoyed in a long time. It was by far the best birthday I have celebrated in 64 years. There were about 30 of my South African friends at the party. I just love the community that we have here at Shikwaru. It is our own little family here in Africa. Beth arrived one week prior to me to do some shopping to decorate and supply our new home. I had last seen it when it was in the final stages of construction in September. It is an absolutely beautiful comfortable home built for community living and lots of company and long-term guests. Lisa Shadley, one of our long-term ambassadors traveled over here early with Beth to help set up housekeeping. Terry Richardson, our other current long-term ambassador, traveled with me. We were both very tired but so excited to be back here in the Africa that we love.

When time permits we take long 5-kilometer walks in the bush at sunrise each morning. I feel so much joy and happiness here in Africa this year. More than I have ever felt in my life. I am sure there are many reasons for my newfound joy but having our own permanent home here is one of the big reasons. The other primary thing that makes me feel such joy is that Beth also feels the same joy. God continues to bless our ministry and marriage, and we continue to experience exponential growth in spite of the slowdown in the worldwide economy. As we drove in, we saw a beautiful new gate entrance into the game farm and into the residential side of the farm. The new ambassador campus is progressing quite well. We are building 3 two-bedroom roundovels and a larger central roundovel for an office and shared dining and laundry facilities for all of our ambassadors. The ambassador campus is being built in honor of our good friends Bob and Leila Thompson. Bob and Leila are from our home church, which supplied a good share of the needed funds for this campus and Bob has been on the mission board at Des Moines First Assembly of God since they first developed a mission board. We presented this honor to Bob and Leila at the fall mission’s convention of First Assembly. Bob and Leila are in their 80’s and were both in good health in November 08 when we had this celebration for them. Just about 2 weeks later Leila became quite ill with breathing difficulties and had emergency heart valve replacement in the hospital. Just 2 weeks ago she passed away as a complication from this surgery. We love both Bob and Lelia so much and miss Leila now that she has passed over into Heaven. However I am so thankful that God gave me the vision to honor them while they were both alive and healthy and could enjoy being honored in this way. This missionary campus will be a small African village standing here at Shikwaru Lodge for many years. These are brick two story homes with a thatched roof and are just beautiful. I love walking by them each morning. When Leila died her family chose to have part of her memorial be given to this campus and the funds we received will be used to furnish the commons area of the Bob and Leila Missionary Campus. Some of Leila’s daughter’s and Beth’s good friends are also establishing a library of Christian books and DVD’s that will be placed in the Ambassador campus central community building. I am so thankful when I follow the little nudges that God sometimes sends my way. A similar thing occurred when I started a free medical clinic at Des Moines First Assembly to honor Beth’s Mom Margaret Cramer. Unfortunately she passed on into Heaven before she knew of that honor. We are praying that Bob Thompson along with several of his friends will be able to come to Africa in July to be present when we officially dedicate the campus. We have a beautiful portrait of them that will permanently hang in the living area of the community building.

Another one of the other main reasons for so much joy in my heart this year is that our two ambassadors, Terry and Lisa, are sacrificially living for the Lord and our ministry here. They both work day and night without ever the smallest complaint or sign of discouragement. In spite of an occasional poisonous snake, a few bugs and rodents, flat tires and getting our vehicles stuck in mud holes. They are working with small salaries and long difficult work schedules and also seem to be filled with joy. One additional small factor that contributes or our joy here, I think, is that we never watch TV, and in the USA all of the negative financial, political, crime news and other bad things steal a lot of people’s joy.
We have completed two of our usual optical outreaches; the first on over in Kwa Zulu Natal working with the Zulu tribes over near the Indian Ocean on the Mozambique and Swaziland border. We had a wonderful time on this outreach seeing nearly 800 children and learning lots about the Zulu culture and history.

Our second outreach was in the Mokopane area near the game farm and it was a blessing to be able to come home and sleep in our own beds each evening. It was also a blessing to be able to serve the children living near our home and headquarters. We saw a little over 800 children on this our second outreach of 2009. The efficiency and quality of our optical clinics continue to improve with each one we do. We are so blessed to have quality equipment like our Nikon Retinomax Auto Refractor. We are also blessed to have a good supply of attractive new glasses that we purchase from China. The children always love their new glasses. Just last night we had a pajama party where we took an online training put on by an eye ministry in Louisville, KY teaching me and the rest of our staff lots more about how we will soon be able to serve and care for children with severe astigmatism. That has been a weakness in the quality of our clinics up until now. I also just learned that if I will simply dilate the eyes of the children we see we will get much more accurate readings from our auto refractor. Since the training was given in Kentucky we were up from 1:00 AM until 5 AM to participate in the live training. I was very tired from hosting our large medical team that had just departed the day of the training but it was well worth getting up for to receive all of the tips that we got.

The last couple of weeks after we completed the second outreach, we all spent a lot of time and effort recruiting South African physicians and hospitals to come to our medical education conference. I had been working on it for about 18 months and had successfully recruited 10 highly trained medical specialists from America to come and speak along with former Governor Brandstad, president of Des Moines University. We also had Jerry Foster, an expert medical financial counselor and author, speaking on preventive maintenance for the medical marriage and financial planning for SA physicians. Right up until the week of the conference we still did not have any South African doctors registered for the conference. I was becoming quite concerned that all of these highly trained professionals would be donating 2 weeks of their time and money to travel 8000 miles just to be speaking to each other and not to the SA doctors as I had planned. We prayed and asked all of our prayer partners to pray with us for the doctors to come to the conference. Just 2 days prior to the conference I called my friend Dr. Buthelezi the head of the Limpopo Health Department in Polokwane and shared with him my concern; he immediately said that he would help me and sent out a notice to all of the public hospitals in Limpopo (about 50 hospitals) encouraging them to send their doctors to the conference. He also arranged for the Limpopo Health department to pay the tuition and lodging for doctors attending our conference. He actually told me that he thought that 150 doctors would be coming to the conference. I then became concerned that our prayers would be answered, and we would have more doctors at the conference that we could properly take care of. Our lodge is prepared to house around 100 guests, so we booked an additional 20 beds with one of our neighbors who also has a game lodge. At the end of the day about 60 doctors came to the conference along with our 5 visiting medical students from Des Moines University. I was proud of all of the American and South African doctors who spoke at the conference. We received lots of feedback from all attending about the excellent quality of the lectures and discussion. We are already beginning to plan our second annual international medical conference at Shikwaru. Next year I am thinking that we should put the conference on for 2 weekends back-to-back and have the American speakers give their same talk at both conferences to permit doctors on call the first weekend to come the second weekend permitting us to serve twice as many medical providers. On Monday after the weekend conference this year we all traveled to Polokwane, Limpopo the capitol city of Limpopo to sign an official agreement between Des Moines University and the Limpopo Department of Health and Social Development. This will pave the way for many new programs and permit us to have many more medical students from Iowa doing clinical rotations here in Africa. So far we have had 13 students do a one-month rotation and have had excellent feedback from all of the regarding the quality of their clinical and cultural experience. We are also helping the University of Limpopo develop a new medical school in Polokwane, and as soon as they begin enrolling students we will also have them do clinical rotations at DMU in Iowa. While the leaders of DMU were visiting the hospitals here in Limpopo they were quite impressed with the potential to expand our current clinical rotations to include a regular elective rotation in obstetrics for all of their students which will mean that soon we will have lots more students from Iowa coming here to SA. It appears that they will be able to deliver many babies during their one month rotation giving them wonderful experience and at the same time helping with the severe shortage of medical providers here in Africa. While the DMU leaders were here we also visited a college of optometry in Limpopo to evaluate the possibility of starting a new college of optometry at DMU. There are currently very few colleges of optometry in the Midwest so it looks like a good opportunity for DMU to grown into this new area. It would also be wonderful in providing many new optometry students and optometry doctors to help us in the optical work we are doing here in Africa. I had been praying that the Lord would provide additional optometrist and now it looks as if He may be blessing us with a whole new optometry college. One amazing thing that happened as we visited the optometry college in Limpopo is that when they learned that we were from Iowa they asked me if we knew Dr. Clark Jensen and he is a friend of mine who practices in Grinell, Iowa and had taught in the optometry school here for 5 years 20 years ago. It is truly a small world. One additional interesting thing I found out when we visited the optometry college is that I learned that they have a mobile outreach to the poor villages in Limpopo that travels by train and delivers free optical care to the poor giving their students good clinical experience and offering care to many people who could otherwise not afford it. They gave me permission to join them on one of these outreaches in August of September.

We really enjoyed hosting Iowa’s former governor Terry Brandstad in our new home. We are thinking of changing the name of his bedroom from the Leopard room to the Governor’s Room. It was amazing to watch he and Beth play Ultimate Scrabble. He held his own with her and she is one of the best scrabble players around as she plays almost every night.

This weekend, to just get away for 24 hours, I drove up to Botswana with Jacques and stayed at a beautiful game reserve right on the Botswana border. Beth and I had stayed there last year and really enjoyed it. The last couple of weeks have been so busy that she decided to stay home and catch up on some laundry and house cleaning. The real reason that I went ahead without her was to help host one of our guests from Iowa who wanted to see the area. This morning we did a game drive in a boat along the Limpopo River and saw three crocodiles.
When I got home this afternoon, I was reminded that we do indeed live in the bush and that it is sometimes a dangerous place. Andre, our professional hunter, was out making his rounds on our farm and found a baby zebra that had been attacked by a leopard. The leopard had attacked him in the neck area and he was severely injured. He brought him down to base camp and we began cleansing and bandaging his wounds. We got some milk and fluids down him and gave him a sedative shot. We were just getting ready to do some surgery on his neck to drain a possible abscess and further clean up the wounds when he stopped breathing. We were hoping that we could save his life and even have a pet zebra around the base camp but he was too young, and his injuries were too severe. The rest of the herd apparently was able to chase away his attacker and allow him to live as long as he did. As I was driving up the mountain this afternoon I also saw a black backed jackal reminding me again that there are lots of predators here and it is survival of the fittest.

We just sent the governor and our team of physicians home on Friday and our next optical team began arriving this afternoon with the arrival of Dustin Cox, a pastor from Waterloo, IA. Our home church, Des Moines First Assembly, will be sending several team members here this coming weekend along with our daughter Kelsey. It will be wonderful to have her here ministering with us for the next month.

Today I had the blessing of delivering my first baby here in South Africa. I was helping Jackie, the wife of our professional hunter, tour the maternity department at Mokopane Hospital and an unattended woman in the room just by the waiting room starting having her baby, so a nurse and I assisted her. It is a 3 kilogram beautiful baby girl.

Blessman Ministries in South Africa

Blog
Jim Blessman, MD, Ambassador to the Children of South Africa

This is my first effort at creating a blog site. I decided that at age 64 it is high time for me to learn to use this wonderful means of communicating with many of the people interested in the work we are doing with children in the beautiful country of South Africa.

This first entry will be a brief history of why and how we began working here, but the main reason for this is to give those of you who are interested a report of our work here for the first quarter of 2009. I will do my best to send quarterly updates to all of you who do not hit the unsubscribe button.

I retired early from my medical practice at age 55 in 2001 to start doing fulltime medical mission work around the world. I had enjoyed a successful medical practice in central Iowa and had achieved all of the goals I had set for myself as a young man. I married my current wife Beth in 1989 and became a Christian soon after that. I began going on short-term mission trips in the early 90’s and traveled to over 60 countries over the next several years. I felt God nudging me closer and closer to going into fulltime medical mission work each time I would go on one of the short-term trips. Finally in 2001, shortly before 9/11, God gave me a very clear signal that I was to walk away from the medical practice and career that I had loved so much and walk down the unknown path of becoming a fulltime medical missionary. Having an entrepreneur spirit all of my life, I formed my own not-for-profit organization, Blessman Medical Ministries. Prior to making this major life change, I read the book Half Time by Bob Buford, which was recommended to me by my good friend Gary Rosberg. I knew that I wanted this next phase of my life to be one of significance rather than one of what the world might consider to be success. I had enjoyed that type of success and loved it, but at the end of the day it was all a bit empty.

The first few years the ministry that my wife and I developed together consisted of continuing to go on short-term mission trips, but instead of joining other teams, we began organizing our own teams, primarily with churches from multiple Christian denominations in Iowa. We were leading an average of one mission trip each month and traveling over 100,000 miles per year primarily to third-world countries much in need of the medical care that we were offering. After doing many of these short-term trips with hundreds of people, I realized that even though we were pleasing God by helping people become followers of Christ, the long term impact, especially medically, was very superficial and limited in really changing people’s lives for the long haul. It was about this time in 2004 that I met my good friend, Jacques van Bommel, in South Africa. From the time that I met Jacques, the Lord just seemed to knit our hearts together and gave us the same vision to serve the children of South Africa. Jacques is the founder and director of Reaching a Generation (RaG). It was also about this time that the focus of our ministry changed from being a medical trip ministry to an optical trip ministry. I found that with the optical trips we could involve more laypeople and that a new pair of proper eyeglasses had a much longer benefit to people who needed them than a bottle of pills.

Beth started traveling with me on all of the trips after our youngest daughter graduated high school, and we stopped focusing on the world and instead narrowed our focus to the children of South Africa. We have now been able to give eyeglasses to nearly 20,000 children in South Africa, prayed with nearly all of them, and listened to the stories of their sometimes very tragic lives. Most all of them suffer from chronic malnutrition, many of them have watched their parents die from HIV/AIDS, and many of them are abused by people taking advantage of them. We have done our best to teach all of these precious children how to keep themselves safe from contacting the AIDS virus. Each of the children we have seen have been given a copy of the Book of Hope which is an age appropriate and culturally appropriate copy of God’s Word.

In 2006 we initiated feeding programs for several hundred orphans and vulnerable children providing well over 1 million meals to the children of Southern Africa in the last 12 months.

These two strong programs, the optical program and the feeding program, have won us considerable favor with the government of South Africa in the Departments of Education and Health at the Provincial level, which enable us to now initiate many other programs.

Last year we started a medical student exchange program between a medical school in Des Moines Iowa, Des Moines University, and a medical school here in South Africa at University of Limpopo whereby students from Iowa come to South Africa for clinical rotations. So far 13 students have been able to take advantage of these rotations and all of them have reported excellent medical and cultural experiences. Just this last month the president of DMU, former Governor Terry Brandstad and the Dean of Students, Dr. Kendal Reed, and Associate Dean of Global studies Dr. Yogesh Shah all traveled here to South Africa to participate in our first international medical conference training South African physicians here at Shikwaru Game Lodge. After this conference we were able to participate in the signing of an official agreement between the Provincial Department of Health and Social Development of Limpopo and Des Moines University. This agreement will permit the training of many more African and American medical students in each other’s institutions. DMU is already planning to expand this program to include regular obstetric rotations for all of their senior medical students. The students will be able to come to Mokopane Hospital near our game reserve and deliver many babies which will help them in their training and also help with the severe shortage of healthcare providers here in South Africa.

Three years ago the Lord blessed Reaching A Generation with a beautiful game reserve in the province of Limpopo. It is a 3000 acre game farm with several nice lodges with sleeping accommodations for our frequent guests. Over the last three years we have been able to improve the quality and value of the farm considerably by adding a luxury tent camp and improving all of the other camps. Jacques was also able to build a beautiful home and office complex for his family and Beth and I have done the same. We currently have 7 people living with us and sharing our work space. In addition we are constructing an ambassador campus that will house three ambassador families that will be working with us long-term, nine out of twelve months every year.

There are many other programs that we are working with here in South Africa such as a new leadership camp to be offered for some of the brightest and best students in South Africa in grades 9 through12 starting in June of this year. We also work with Reaching a Generation in training the teachers of South Africa how to teach their students general life skills. Basically this is a program to help the teachers teach the students what their parents should be teaching them about life. This was initiated because of the terrible AIDS epidemic ravaging this part of the world. Southern Africa has the highest rate of HIV infection of any place in the world.

This year we are also starting a pen pal program called Letternet to teach these same values to orphan children in the public schools. Each child will be partnered with a Christian family in South Africa in partnership with the Department of Education and their teachers.

This has been a somewhat brief summary of where we have come from and what we are doing here. Our mission statement in general is to Please God by serving the children of Southern Africa.

My next blog entry will be some photos and the stories of our work here for the first 3 months of 2009.