VIETNAM - EARLY IMPACT Travel Journals: October 10-17, 1996 (Part 5)

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Tuesday, October 15, 1996: The next operation I viewed included Dr. Rennie Crane as the surgeon. He was assigned a patch-up job. His patient was a middle-aged man who had previously had a large facial tumor removed from the lower right side of his face. The tumor had spread to include the lower right jawbone. So during the former procedure, doctors had also cut away the jawbone. The previous surgery had to heal correctly before someone could go back in and replace the jaw. But how do you replace a jaw? You can’t just run down to the parts house on the corner and pick up a jawbone. So you have to be creative.

While Dr. Crane started cutting from below the Adam’s apple upward, one of the Vietnamese surgeons began opening up the patient’s rib cage. They apparently found the bone they thought would be just right and proceeded to hack and saw away until they had removed it from its lodging. Once removed, the bone was placed on a stainless-steel table, and Dr. Crane commenced whittling and shaping it into a jawbone. Satisfied with that step, he then went back to preparing the jaw to receive the new addition. Several hours into the operation, the looks on the doctor’s faces told me the procedure was getting more complicated than first predicted. The looks of doubt turned to frustration … lots of tension … lots of sweat. They kept opening the neck and jaw area up wider and wider, trying to get the replacement bone connected and situated right.

I remember thinking to myself, If I were doing the procedure, right about now I would be wishing that I were welding on a piece of farm machinery, and I could torch and cut and weld the piece of steel. And if I really messed it up or broke it beyond repair, I could just go buy a new part and start over again. But that guy was alive, and the pieces all had to work correctly when he woke up.

When Dr. Crane finally finished, the job was beautiful, and the jaw hinge worked wonderfully well.

During several other surgeries, I watched Dr. Randy Robinson, on two different occasions, remove ribs from children and carve them into shapes that looked like small butter croissants. He then surgically planted them on the sides of kids’ skulls to form the structure behind the outer ear. Those cases were where the children had been born without any ear at all on one side of the head. The rib bone build-up was the first step before taking other cartilage and skin pieces and making a new ear simply out of borrowed parts. 

Dr. Crane was scrambling to get his patient stitched shut. We had all been invited to a luncheon banquet at noon by Dr. An and the staff at the institute. Lunch was held up a bit, but eventually we all got there. We were treated royally. Face the Challenge and Project C.U.R.E. were honored by the institute leaders, who not only gave us gifts, but more important by far, extended to us their feelings of deep gratitude.

They told Randy that many of the procedures and techniques that the institute doctors and staff had learned from Randy and his team over the past two years had already been passed on to the craniofacial surgeons out in the provinces.

Wednesday, October 16

Yesterday was the last day for the team to do surgeries. They had worked late last night to try to finish up on the agreed-upon cases. To start out the day today, the entire team met on the ninth floor of the Saigon Hotel for a time of devotions and a discussion of the plans to pack and prepare to leave Vietnam. We all then gathered on the big wooden stairway of the hotel for a final group picture.

At 9:00 a.m., a group of us headed to the hospitals to do rounds to check on patients. That served as a great opportunity for me to take some follow-up pictures of the patients I had seen go through the surgeries. We first went to the institute hospital. Every patient looked better than I even thought they would. As you might expect, there was some swelling, and some patients still required drains and bandages, but some of the cases I thought most difficult looked absolutely great.

The patients who were old enough to know what had taken place could simply not stop thanking the doctors. Many had made cards, which they gave to the nurses and doctors. Also, many of the parents had made little gifts of appreciation for the team.

I don’t know for sure … maybe the first day of heaven will be a little like that.

At 11:00, we made our way to the health-center hospital. I was able to see again the little, young couple and the seven-month-old baby boy we had seen in the recovery room. The mother was still gently rocking her baby as she stood singing the same lullaby tune I had heard the other day.

The health-center hospital had planned for a luncheon banquet today. They were so generous with their words and tokens of thanks. After the lunch and after finishing making the rounds, the team made sure that everything that is to go back to Denver was securely packed. All the supplies, most of the medicines, and all the equipment that Project C.U.R.E. furnished or Face the Challenge brought will stay in Vietnam to be used by either of the two hospitals or to be passed on to the provincial hospitals.

This evening was celebration and farewell time. We all walked from the hotel down to the river and boarded the restaurant ship Mermaid. We had a delightful dinner being tugged up the river and floating down.

Thursday, October 17

Between the time of the river dinner last night and our departure for the airport this morning, almost everyone to the person asked for information about Project C.U.R.E. and how they could get involved. When I explained to them that our goal is to have between twenty and twenty-five Project C.U.R.E. warehouses placed in strategically located medical cities, many volunteered to be part of organizing a warehouse operation.

At the airport I parted ways with the team. Their tickets will take them to Los Angeles via Singapore. They will stay on layover one night in Singapore. My ticket will take me to San Francisco via Hong Kong and then straight to Denver. That makes an extremely long trip out of it, but I am ready to get home to some crisp, clean sheets and then on to the work that has been piling up in the office. In just several more days, I will be re-packing my travel things and hopping on another jet that will deliver me to Ethiopia. I thank God for all the opportunities!

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VIETNAM - EARLY IMPACT: Monday, October 14, 1996 (Part 4)

Ho Chi Minh City: Monday, October 14,1996: Dr. Randy, Bill LeTourneau, one of the team members, and I hurriedly left the health-center hospital as soon as the patients were all checked. We were scheduled to meet with Professor Lam Ngoc An, the head of the institute hospital. With Dr. An, we discussed at length the work of Project C.U.R.E. and the possibility of working together in the future. Joining us in the meeting was Dr. Huynh Daltai, the hospital administrator. I told them that I thought I could help meet their requests to send additional medical supplies to them in the future. They requested goods for their own hospital as well as the hospitals in the other twenty-seven regions of the southern part of Vietnam. The population in that southern part of Vietnam is well over thirty-five million. There are tremendous needs.

I explained the procedures and policies of Project C.U.R.E., and then I pulled out a Needs Assessment Study form and began asking all the necessary questions for our records. The doctors explained exactly how their health-care system worked and were eager to sign our Request for Assistance form.

By that time the patients and operating rooms were ready for the afternoon schedule. I followed Randy into the first operating room after washing, and donning my scrubs, cap, and mask.

The anesthesiologist was just putting to sleep a twenty-year-old Vietnamese woman who had the disease commonly known as “the elephant man disease.” When I saw her, I remembered the movie of the real-life story of the elephant man, who because of his grotesque skin and tissue growth, became a curious attraction to circus goers.

The Vietnamese girl’s face was already sadly ugly, especially on her left side. Additionally, she had it starting on her lower-left rib-cage area and on her back. The doctors made the decision to work on the face and to also remove the growth area from her front, but not to do anything about the growths on her back.

As the team began, I wondered how in the wide world they would ever go about correcting such an awful situation. Indeed, where would they even start? They told me that it was a situation where her condition was not going to be healed, but the surgery would remove the massive growths and the leathery folds of excess skin and give her a presentable and recognizable face. They then proceeded to do just that.

They started by cutting a line in the scalp above the hairline. Then they virtually peeled her face skin forward. When they reached the eye area, cuts were made just below the eyebrows in order to leave all of that area intact. Once the skull and upper jaw areas were exposed, the growths were cut free and removed. The same sequence was followed as they moved down toward the lower jaw area. Eventually the excess skin and tissue were trimmed, and the suturing process began.

By the time the procedure was completed, about the most I could see was a very finely stitched line running from up in the hair straight down to the lower jaw, just in front of the left ear. The stitches in the eyebrow were hidden, and the cut in the scalp up in the hairline will never be seen. I was impressed!

The few little sentences describing a four- or five-hour surgical procedure certainly bear witness to my medical ineptitude. You will simply have to excuse my lack of medical correctness in the area of descriptive surgery. I would recommend two things for you to do for additional and more medically correct details: First, request access to all my gory and bloody photos. Second, go with me next time. But for now, please grant pardon.

The next cranio-maxillofacial procedure undertaken by our team at the Saigon hospital attested to the tragedies of crime and violence. A young Vietnamese man had gotten engaged in a conflict with some pretty hard-core evil people. In an act of retaliation, the perpetrator did not have a gun but managed to find a container of acid. They took the acid and threw it in the face of the young man. His skin literally melted and ran down his face. He had managed to keep his mouth from sealing shut, but everything else on the front of his head was a slick, shiny covering of plastic-looking tissue. The acid had even softened the bone structure of his forehead and cheekbones so almost all the structural features of his face were lost.

But the young man was alive and had claimed, subsequent to the mishap, that he could detect light from behind the solid screen of tissue in the area of his right eye. So, there was hope that if they cut through the scar-tissue covering, a functional eye might be discovered that will once again enable the young man to see.

While the doctors were at it, they decided to transplant some hair-growing skin over the top of the eye sockets and fashion for him two eyebrows. There was a lot of hope floating around the operating theater as they brought the patient in and the anesthetist put him to sleep.

About an hour and a half into the procedure, the surgeon looked up at us and shrugged his shoulders. Behind that cruel mask, there was no eyeball. The acid that had been thrown in his face had also melted the eyeballs. Apparently, the detection of light must have been an apparition. As the inevitable became apparent and the hope passed, everyone in the room seemed to exhale in kind of a disappointed sigh. The team then went to work opening both eye sockets and preparing them for a prosthesis in each. With some recreated facial features, the young man can be encouraged that he is not such a spectacle of gruesome horror walking around.

Besides the intensity and concentration demanded throughout the operations, the roller-coaster ride of emotions stemming from the triumphs and disappointments of the actual procedures exacted a price from all involved. Several of the days, the teams returned to the surgical rooms after dinner and performed their pro-bono acts of mercy far into the night.

As I watched the two teams function in the four different operating rooms, I was proud of the Face the Challenge group. Project C.U.R.E. supplies everywhere, and I watched as the attendant nurses tore into boxes and packs of medical goods that had come from our warehouse. I thanked God for Ruth and Rich and the Quinns and all the people who so faithfully picked up and delivered and sorted, inventoried, and prepared the loads of equipment and supplies for all the containers that were sent from our humble donated warehouse in Denver. Somehow all the efforts seemed very worthwhile. Somehow the grueling travel, the strange food, the lumpy beds with smelly covers, and not being able to snuggle with Anna Marie or play with my grandkids took on a proportional value in light of eternity.

Tonight, a group of us ventured out and found a small restaurant that serves Thai food. It was pretty hot, and caused this Irishman to sweat a whole lot; but it was good for the variety.

In cases like that, I try to play it safe and stick with some chicken or fish item, but then I walk down the streets and see the hanging chickens in the open market and the fish for sale in the hot metal tubs, and I wince knowing full well where the restaurants buy their meat. Oh well!

Tuesday, October 15
I was up early this morning, still grinning over the recent miracles taking place in the surgery rooms. I’ve been having a great opportunity to get acquainted with the individual team members at meals and riding back and forth to the hospitals.

This morning I had the privilege of watching Dr. Jerry Popham in action. Dr. Jerry Popham is an orthodontist and also a plastic surgeon. He serves on the board of Face the Challenge and is a Harvard graduate. He is an excellent cranio-maxillofacial surgeon and is married to a Japanese American lady who is also a doctor.

What he did in the procedure I never imagined could be done. The young woman, about twenty years old, had suffered from some kind of facial paralysis on the left side. The condition had lasted long enough so that gravity’s pull had taken over where there had once been facial muscle tension. So the result was the sliding down of the entire left side of her face. At the time of the operation, it hung down a full four inches below her left jawbone. The objective was to remove the excess muscle tissue and skin, reshape the left side of her face, and create some kind of a muscle network that will keep the face held up and maybe even let her smile once again.

Dr. Jerry started out with the process of going from ear to ear over the top of the head with an incision that would release the face from the forehead. Then another incision went from the first line down to the jaw … just in front of the left ear. The doctors had to work so carefully and tediously so they wouldn’t inadvertently cut a nerve. Of course, they had to continuously utilize the electric cauterizing tool to sear shut the blood vessels that were severed during the procedure.

After Dr. Jerry had worked carefully around the eye area and loosened the face from the skull and cheek area, he ran a probe all the way down to the left corner of the mouth and exited where the upper and lower lips met. He then went up on the skull and began cutting a strip of muscle about a quarter of an inch wide. He swung that muscle downward through the articulated pathway he had prepared, pulled the muscle through the hole he had designed at the left corner of the mouth, and secured it there with stitches. Everything was reshaped, tightened up, and sewn back together. I don’t know how many times during those procedures I told the surgeons how much I marveled at their skill and creativity, but more than that, I marveled at their dedication and willingness to go all the way to Vietnam and donate these talents in an endeavor to share Christ’s love and help some hurting person experience a better life.

Next Week: How do you Make a Jaw Bone?

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VIETNAM - EARLY IMPACT Travel Journals: October 10-17, 1996 (Part 3)

Ho Chi Minh City (Old Saigon): Monday, October 14, 1996:

Following the press conference and lunch meeting with Dr. Khoi, the four of us representing Face the Challenge and Project C.U.R.E. returned to the recovery room to check on the children who had just come out of surgery. By then, the babies were awake, and Dr. Randy and Dr. Barry wanted to see how their patients were doing.

The scene I encountered next has burned a picture into my mind that I will never be able to forget. The mother of the terribly disfigured seven-month-old baby had arrived at the recovery room with her young husband. The baby boy was their firstborn child. He was the baby that was so disfigured that the mother had to extract the milk from her breast and feed the baby with a spoon, being careful not to drown the child. When the baby tried to swallow the liquid would come right back out of its face.

Cathy Bueche, a recovery-room nurse from Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver, and Leslie Turner, a recovery-room nurse from Kansas City, were taking care of the patients as they regained consciousness. The little boy was awake and was not crying … just whimpering, looking for the reassurance of his mommy.

Leslie handed the baby to the young mother, and she smiled from ear to ear. Then with her husband looking over her shoulder, the weight and impact of the occasion hit her. Her smiles momentarily turned to a look of disbelief, and you could tell she was struggling to decide if what she was seeing was for real or if she was sleeping and just dreaming another haunting and cruel dream about having a perfectly normal baby. She held the little guy tightly to her breast and then pulled him back up and looked straight into his face again. She could not hold the seven months of pent-up emotion inside any longer.

I have not seen many Asian women cry before, but this little, young mother could not restrain the emotion and the flow of tears. She cried softly for a little while. The tears dropped down on the baby as she held him again to her breast. Then she pulled him back and looked at him again, and when she saw her own tears on the baby’s body, she realized that the moment was not a dream. It was real. Far gone now, I’m sure, was the moment in the room where the baby was born, and she was handed the child for the first time, and the horror and disappointment had filled her mind while at the same time love for the precious child filled her heart. Gone now were the long hours of rocking and walking the child, looking down at his face and questioning why her baby, her very first baby, was to go through life like that. Had she done something wrong? Were they being punished? There were never any answers to her questions before, but now she was holding the beautiful baby of her dreams. She had loved him completely when he was deformed. Now she could love him completely whole.

As she looked once more at the baby, the little boy’s brown eyes met her eyes, and he tried to smile. That was more than she could handle. Her tears now flowed freely, and she sobbed. The young father, who had his arm around the mother as he looked on, dropped his arm, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small, dirty handkerchief. He took the rag and began wiping the tears from the mother’s face as he himself quietly cried.

Something special happened in that recovery room on a hot Monday in Old Saigon city, Vietnam. Jesus came to visit and heal the torn hearts of a young Vietnamese couple who did not even know that his name is Jesus. And Jesus came to reward some obedient doctors and nurses as they saw for themselves the power of love at work in a part of the world historically torn by hate.

Earlier, I had traveled to Israel to deliver three cargo containers of medical supplies to the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center. I walked again the streets of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem, and the shores of Galilee. I remember wishing that I had been there as Jesus walked the streets and countryside trails and healed the bodies and mended the broken hearts. But early afternoon on Monday, October 14, 1996, in a very modest hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I walked where Jesus walked. I didn’t walk historically where Jesus walked; I walked with him today down the corridors of that hospital into that recovery room, where he gave me a personal lesson in his love and healing power. I shall take with me into eternity the looks on Dr. Randy’s and Dr. Barry’s faces, and on Ginger Robinson’s and the other nurses’ faces. And I will always hold as precious the picture burned into my heart and mind of that Vietnamese family of three, standing there totally bathed in an experience of boundless love. 

As I left the recovery room, I could hear the mother begin to softly sing a lullaby to the child—or maybe it was angels I heard singing.

Next Week: What a Team of Talent!  

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VIETNAM - EARLY IMPACT Travel Journals: October 10-17, 1996 (Part 2)

Ho Chi Minh City (Old Saigon): October 14, 1996: My alarm rang at 5:15 a.m. I wasn’t sure why, except for the fact that I had set it for that time while I was still in my right mind. But I was certainly far from my right mind that early in the morning. The bus had been scheduled to leave the hotel to go to the hospital at 7:00 a.m. sharp. Dr. Randy Robinson brought surgery-room scrubs along for me to wear so that I can be in the operating room for the procedures. That will not only allow me to get better acquainted with the twenty-five-member team but will also allow me to take my camera into the operating room and get some pictures of the actual procedures.

Plans were made to work simultaneously at two different hospitals. One hospital is called the Institute of Odonto-Stomatology located at 201A Nguyen Chi Thanh Street. Its director, Dr. Lam Ngoc An, is a very gracious man and prepared well for the team’s appearance. That hospital is connected with the university medical school that teaches cranio-maxillofacial procedures and plastic surgery. But even with the doctors they are turning out from the institute, there is still a backlog of over seven thousand children with hair lip and cleft palate in Vietnam who need surgery. Also, there are hundreds of adults who are deformed, never having had access to medical procedures. Dr. An and Dr. Huynh Dai Hai and the other professors and doctors are doing the best they can to catch up to the situation.

The second hospital is referred to as the health center, directed by Dr. Khoi. This morning the team was divided into two groups, half going to the institute, and the other half going to the center. Dr. Randy Robinson and Dr. Barry Steinberg were the surgeons at the center. There were two operating theaters prepared for the team at both hospitals. So, every day the team was there, four surgeries were going on at the same time.

I decided to go with the group to the health center to start my day. While we were waiting for the first patients to be brought in, Randy took me around and showed me where they had put all the supplies from Project C.U.R.E.

On one of the days before my arrival, the team had unloaded the shipping cargo container and sorted and divided the materials between the two hospitals. The team was overwhelmed that we had sent so much good, good “stuff” along. I was able to take pictures of the medical supplies that were stacked not only in the operating-room supply area but also in a separate storage area of the hospital complex. Project C.U.R.E. had sent well in excess of $300,000 worth of medical supplies in that load.

When the operations got underway, I was able to walk back and forth between the two theaters and take photos of both procedures taking place.

Dr. Barry Steinberg is one of Randy’s professors at the University of Michigan Medical School. He holds PhD, DDS, MD, and FACS credentials. He is still director of the residency program at the University of Michigan, where he teaches, and is also chief of service at Mott Children’s Hospital. Dr. Steinberg is not only smart; he has some very gifted hands.

His first patient was a ten-year-old girl. She was very badly disfigured and should have had surgery when she was a baby. She had a hair lip, a severe cleft palate, and no functional nose on the left side. I watched with amazement at how Dr. Barry restructured the girl’s face.

The procedure was complicated enough that while Dr. Barry was working on the face, Dr. Randy opened up the girl’s hip, chiseled out some hip bone, and scooped out quite a large amount of bone marrow. He told me that when they need bone material like that, they usually take it from the hip, the ribs, or the skull.

In order for Dr. Barry to close off the cleft palate, he had to restructure the roof of the mouth and then pack in the bone marrow all the way out to the gums and nose area. He then took larger pieces of bone chips and formed a functional nose. He told me as he was packing in the bone marrow and forming together the bone chips, “Jim, you have to make sure that all this new material connects, because the healing agents can swim … but they can’t fly.”

He opened then, for the first time, a passageway for airflow on the left side of the nose. The operation took about five hours, but when Dr. Barry stitched her all shut, I could hardly believe that it was the same little girl.

As I watched, I could only imagine the difference this surgery is going to make in that child’s life. Of course, she is never going to be as perfect and beautiful in features as, say, one of your grandchildren, but now she will be able to breathe and eat normally and will probably marry and have a family of her own.

While Dr. Barry continued operating in one room, Dr. Randy proceeded with his surgery in the other room. He was working on a precious little baby boy, less than seven months old. The condition was a double hair lip. It was really quite grotesque.

I remembered seeing the young mother holding her baby when we went to the ward and Dr. Randy had done a pre-op check. There was fear in the mother’s eyes as she gave the baby to Dr. Randy to hold, but with her entire face, she was almost pleading for someone to do something about her ugly but precious little baby. The baby could not suck, so the mother had to extract the milk from her breast and spoon-feed it, being very careful that it did not spill into the air passageway and drown the child.

I noticed that Dr. Randy had taken his pen and drawn a mouth diagram on the surgery drape on the baby’s shoulder. He then took a surgical pen and made reference dots on the baby’s face. I thought as I watched him that he is not only a skilled surgeon, but he also has to be an artist, visualizing a perfect mouth all the while he is cutting and stitching that little face.

The center one-third of the upper lip simply did not exist, but down from where the lower part of the nose should have been was a single piece of bone jutting out and looking as if a single tooth will protrude from it someday. From the corners of the mouth upward, there were two very short sections of lip coming from each side. Then the normal part of the lip turned into two large bulbs, each almost the size of a regular baby’s nose. It was quite clear to me that the center had given to the visiting team their most complicated cases to fix.

I watched Dr. Randy and a woman from Florida, Cindy Surmaczewica, his attendant nurse for the day, as they worked like clockwork together. Cindy almost knew what Dr. Randy was going to do next. There was a tremendous amount of concentration taking place, and you could feel the intensity of the situation with each slice of the scalpel and each stitch of the curved needle.

When it came time for Dr. Randy to make new lip pieces to fill in under the restructured nose, he slit open the large flesh bulbs and began carving the tissue out of them and stretching them across to join beneath the nose. It was not just a surface procedure that took place. The skin on the outside must all fit together, but so must all the pieces of tissue and muscle underneath the skin. Likewise, the inside of the mouth must be restructured correctly, as well as the outside, and the new lips must be secured to the gums as well as to the base of the nose structure.

After more than four hours, the job was really beginning to look incredible to me, but Dr. Randy was not quite happy with how the last part was coming together. So he unstitched part of what he had done and reformed the little lip until it came together and matched up perfectly.

Dr. Barry Steinberg’s patient had been moved into the recovery room and was waking up. I imagine that the ten-year-old girl is not only going to have an extremely sore face for a while, but she is also going to have to put up with a sore hip where the bone had been removed. It would be quite an experience,

I suppose, if I could tap into her thoughts the first time she looks into a mirror and sees that she has a nose, and the first time she experiences swallowing without the water coming out the front of her face. At age ten, she certainly is old enough to never forget that doctor who loved her enough to come all the way from America to Vietnam to make her beautiful.

With the first surgeries finished, we all went to the breakroom and grabbed some bread and cheese and junk food. Then we scurried off to meet with Dr. Khoi and the other hospital officials. They had arranged for a meeting and had invited the TV cameramen and press. That was the first time I have ever done an interview while wearing operating-room scrubs. I did get my mask turned around and my cap pulled off, but I looked down and noticed that I still had my booties on. However, no problem, because the other Americans looked the same way.

Next Week: Miracle Workers in the Operating Theater

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VIETNAM - EARLY IMPACT Travel Journals: October 10-17, 1996 (Part 1)

Note to Readers: Project C.U.R.E. has now been in existence over thirty-three years –that’s 33 years --. Some of our most successful work over those years has taken place in the mysterious, and beautiful country of Vietnam. I want to share with you here a slice of that experience by allowing you to be a part of the early days of Project C.U.R.E.’s involvement in Vietnam.

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Vietnam: October 1996: My life has already spanned an interesting mini-segment of world history. I was born after the end of World War I and before the United States’ involvement in World War II. By the time I was five years old, the Second World War was over, and all the international leaders congregated in New York to assure the war-weary world that never again would there be war. We had just come through the war to end all wars. And, finally, we had become civilized folks who, from that day on, would never have to experience the hardships and horrors of military conflict. All disputes and controversies could, in the future, be taken to a glorified powwow center that would be built in New York City. The mushroom cloud was making everybody bend their “weapons into plowshares”—whatever that meant.

I remember the kids in our classroom collecting pennies, nickels, and dimes and sending them off to help construct the United Nations building. The scary scenes from newspaper pictures and news filmstrips of the war front were still fresh in our minds. Out on the playground, if you really wanted to call some kid a bad name, you would call him a “moose-a-lini,” ’cause everyone was talking about the bad man from Italy … or you were “nothing but the toe-jam from the toe-jo of Tokyo.” We had switched from playing Cowboys and Indians to playing army. One kid would raise his fist into the air and yell, “Hi-ho Hitler,” and all the other kids would raise imaginary rifles, take aim, and shoot him dead!

But those bad days were all gone. I remembered huddling around the arch-topped, wooden radio in the living room of my grandpa’s house. We would listen to a newscaster named Gabriel Heatter or another man who would say, “All the news that’s news today is brought to you by Hemmingway.” They kept all of us posted on the ending of the war.

One day when the radio man said the war was over, we all ran outside and started honking the horns of all the cars in the neighborhood. Nobody was driving around at that time. Everyone was just sitting in the cars honking the horns. Gasoline was being rationed, and no one had extra to use just riding around.

Later that evening, everyone threw gas-rationing fears to the wind. The streets were jammed in our little town with people riding around in their cars, waving their arms out the windows, and cheering to each other … and still honking their car horns.

A short time later, my uncles started coming home from the front. They brought great things home for us to look at and fool with … like guns and hand grenades and parachutes and knives. But some of the neighborhood families’ kids never came home. Instead, the government sent each of those families a flag. They would hang their flags by their front doors or from their porches and leave them there for a long time.

For a little kid, it was a wonderful feeling to know that there would never be war again. I remember having decided while the terrible fighting was going on that if I ever had to go to war, I would be the captain of a big navy ship. But it was not to be that I would ever have to go to war.

However, something happened to the great “powwow” plan. Building the United Nations center didn’t stop people from fighting. Soon the newspapers were telling about Stalin and Mr. Mao from China helping North Korea invade Seoul, South Korea. LIFE magazine and newspapers started showing lots more scary pictures of dead and freezing American soldiers. The dads of two of my good school chums, Buddy Himbigner and Jerry Stump, went to the Korea “conflict.” Patrick Peterson’s dad also went but never came back. He was killed when the Chinese came over the border “like human waves.”

At our house we talked about how bad a deal it was that Mr. Truman fired General MacArthur before he could do his job. But Russia, China, and North Korea really didn’t want anyone else on the Korean Peninsula.

The construction of the United Nations building with the help of our nickels and dimes didn’t stop the people in another part of the world from fighting either. In the late 1800s, the French colonized the people of Vietnam, and later the Japanese came in and occupied Vietnam much as they had occupied Korea in 1910. Their occupation was very cruel, and history has recorded many Japanese atrocities in both countries.

But when the Japanese were defeated in 1945, the allies divided Vietnam into two zones. It was much the same course that was followed in Korea. Korea was divided at the 38th parallel, and Russia was put in charge of rounding up the Japanese in the north and deporting them back to Japan. The US was responsible for ridding the area south of the 38th parallel of the Japanese and sending them back from there.

In Vietnam, the British cleared the Japanese out of the south portion of the country and turned that area back to the French. It was China’s obligation to clear the Japanese out of the north. They did so and then turned the north over to Vietnam’s emperor, Bao Dai. The emperor soon conceded power and turned the north over to the rule of strongman Ho Chi Minh. He declared total independence for Vietnam in 1946 and attacked the French in order to reunite the country.

The New York powwow tried to work out a deal. The Geneva Accords were signed, and plans were drawn for a total national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956. Prior to the election, the country remained divided, but the leader of the south, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to go along with the new election agreements, and full-fledged civil war broke out between north and south.

The United States was scared to death that the Communists were going to take over the entire country, much like the North Korea situation. So, we began pouring tremendous amounts of support into the fracas to strengthen the south. Soon, American troops were trying to fight everywhere.

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had the Americans fighting the Vietcong, who were southern Communists fighting the southern government as well as all the north Vietnamese troops. Things really got complicated when the war spread over into Laos and Cambodia. We were fighting and bombing everybody everywhere.

Eventually, in April 1975, the US withdrew its troops from Vietnam, and Saigon fell to the Communists. The “Commies,” at that point, took Laos and Cambodia as well as all of Vietnam. In 1976 Vietnam officially reunited as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. By 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, the Communist Party’s general secretary, championed doi moi or “renovation,” and Vietnam subsequently endeavored to open up to private enterprise and trade. The US still maintained a policy of boycott or sanctions against Vietnam, but relations were beginning to thaw, as evidenced by Washington’s opening of a diplomatic office in Hanoi in 1991.

It really seemed interesting to me that I had been around and witnessed all of those major political conflicts that ended up in the military involvement of the US, yet the conflicts were spaced in time in such a way that I was never expected to actually go and be physically involved in any of them. I was too young during the Korea mess and already had a family by the time the Vietnamese conflict heightened. Additionally, my county of residence in rural Idaho always covered their military quotas through volunteers seeking a more exciting option than working on the family farm.

But as a person who has always been a student of politics, the economy, and global affairs, I had followed closely over the years the unfolding situations around the world.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of that as I prepare for the present trip to Vietnam. It is now a country of close to seventy million people.

Well over 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen, and the lack of medical supplies, medicine, and modern medical equipment is a major, major problem.

My involvement in Vietnam really began almost two years ago. Dr. Randy Robinson from Denver had contacted me to see if we could donate some medical goods to his organization Face the Challenge. Randy solicits the volunteer help of doctors who, like himself, specialize in craniofacial reconstruction. The assembled team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses go into a country and perform the facial restructuring necessary, and then they do the skin grafts needed to complete the job. They have performed hundreds of hair-lip and cleft-palate procedures on kids in South America and China, as well as in Vietnam.

Project C.U.R.E. was excited to donate some needed supplies, but this year we decided to get a little more involved and agreed to come alongside Dr. Robinson’s group in a significant way. In July we sent an ocean-going cargo container on ahead of our visit. The container included nearly $300,000 worth of medical supplies, equipment, and hospital items.

On September 15, the entire team involved in the Vietnam project for 1996 met at the Robinsons’ home to finalize and review all the plans. A Vietnamese woman named Binh Rybacki, whom I had not met in Colorado, came that night to brief everyone on Vietnamese customs and to teach us some necessary language phrases. Binh had been rescued off the US embassy roof as Saigon fell to the Communists. She had subsequently gone back and set up orphanages. She presently cares for 758 children and calls them her “children of peace.”

All the other team members left Denver International Airport on October 4, but I had to attend trustee board meetings for Colorado Christian University on Friday and Saturday. I also had some precommitted obligations at Cherry Hills Community Church the first part of the week, helping in their annual missions festival. So, it was impossible for me to leave until October 10.

Thursday, October 10–Saturday, October 12
My flight, United 1125, left Thursday morning, October 10, for Hong Kong via San Francisco. I arrived in Hong Kong at 5:30 p.m. on Friday after only a one-hour delay in San Francisco. I found my way to the Regal Hotel on Sa Po Road in Hong Kong and got a good night’s sleep. By 4:30 this afternoon (Saturday, October 12), I will arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Next Week: Old Saigon

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COMMUNITY

Dwight D. Eisenhower was president during the formative years of my life. In those years following World War II and the Korean War, he reminded us, “This world of ours . . .  must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” I grew up believing in the virtue of community.

The word community is derived from joining two Latin concepts— com, which means “with” or “together,” and munus, which means “gift” or “the gift of being together.” Indeed, community is a gift! Elements affecting the identity of a particular community could include beliefs, resources, intentions, needs, preferences, risk levels, and common emotional connections.

Wherever community exists, security and freedom will more than likely be found as well. Community has a way of taking on a life of its own, and that seems to allow people to become free enough to share and secure enough to get along. There is a sense of connectedness that often flows as a result of community. It has the power to dispel loneliness and nurture the mutual respect and trust President Eisenhower referred to.

To me, community is evidence enough that love, respect, and civility can exist in a world of disconnectedness and greed. Fighting each other or ignoring each other aren’t the only two options available to cohabiters of this planet: Love, respect, goodness, and civility are also viable options.

While traveling around the world for decades, I’ve fallen in love with the people of old-world cultures and communities. President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, used to say, “While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many.” 

In older European communities, neighbors have been required to live in close proximity for a long time. I’ve always enjoyed traveling in the cities of Belgrade or Kiev or in the countries of Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, or Armenia. At night throughout Europe, people love to get out of their homes, put on clean clothes, and go to the downtown centers to walk, visit, and stop at the sidewalk cafés to have coffee and maybe some ice cream.

I’ve strolled with them and socialized with their neighbors until nearly midnight. Some unusual and compelling factors of community were displayed in those parts of the world that were wholesome and inviting. Most of the towns were eagerly at work trying to revitalize their cities and municipal regions. People were hardy and at the same time willing to return attention, love, and appreciation. 

I used to say to Anna Marie that if she ever looked for me and found me missing, she could probably safely start looking for me in Brazil, because I had a real affinity for the country and the people.

But now I don’t know. The beauty; the flowers; the inexpensive personal economy, including food, transportation, and utilities; the fresh fruit and relatively mild winters; and the endearing people of community—all of these qualities just might have folks looking for me in some classical, historic home on a small plot of ground near the Black Sea.

I’m so glad, however, that I’ve lived long enough to experience the advent of the Internet. It has added a whole new and different dimension to community. No longer is the geographical neighborhood, or a leisurely stroll in the evening in Belgrade, the dominating factor in community. Now I can Skype, text or write computer messages to thousands of my friends every week. I can send those messages to homes, offices, and phones in every corner of the world, and my friends can respond to me as quickly as if we were sitting together over a cup of coffee. As we freely communicate with one another, we successfully form a virtual community that fulfills the same community functions of sharing beliefs, resources, intentions, needs, preferences, risk levels, and common emotional connections typically shared in traditional community.

There’s one more exciting aspect of community that I would like to explore here. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote a book titled The Great Good Place. It speaks to the recognized phenomenon that Western cultures seem to be losing citizen involvement in traditional community. In another book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, author Robert Putnam underscores that trend of thought when he writes that in the past twenty-five years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 43 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 35 percent. It may be that we are in danger of losing the spirit of community that once existed in some of our institutions, including churches and community centers.

In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg suggests that we really need three places for community to exist: the home, the office, and a community gathering place. Starbucks, for example, was found to fulfill the need for the third place. Oldenburg’s experiment has proven overwhelmingly successful.

I believe that in a very unique way, Project C.U.R.E. has become an example of a third place expressly for community. That’s one reason we have over 30,000 volunteers rather than 125. True community exists and is experienced by the faithful volunteers of Project C.U.R.E.

I’m excited to think that in the future, Project C.U.R.E. could become a dynamic center for purposeful community all over the United States and around the world. People would gather not only to enjoy a steaming latte or a good cup of chai but also to meet with friends and associates to build community around a common goal of goodness specifically aimed at delivering health and hope to needy friends all around the community of the world.

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EMPTY JARS AND CRACKED POTS

Ancient Demosthenes astutely observed, “As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved by their speeches whether they be wise or foolish.” Others have implied that an empty vessel makes the loudest sound. I’ve observed, however, that genius and mystery are sometimes discovered in a cracked pot.

I first heard of the Plain of Jars during the US-Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States had showered Laos with more missiles than it had dumped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. The Xieng Khouang Province was one of the most heavily bombed targets in history. According to conservative estimates, approximately five hundred thousand tons of bombs were dropped in this area during the Pathet Lao offensive to cut off the movement of Communist North Vietnamese troops under the command of Ho Chi Minh. Many of the bombs didn’t explode and still present a problem today, more than forty years since the end of the war. The risk from unexploded bombs is so great that tourists must stay on designated paths when sightseeing in this area.

Never did I dream that one day I would actually get to visit the Plain of Jars, which are located on the high-mountain plateaus in Laos. I had been asked to perform needs assessments for several Lao hospitals in the area that had requested donated medical goods from Project C.U.R.E. Just outside the city of Xieng Khouang was located one of the ancient sites where the mysterious hand-carved stone vessels still remained.

These massive jars measure up to nine feet in height, and the largest jars weigh around fourteen tons. Carved from sandstone, granite, or other types of stone, some jars are round and others are angular. All are thought to have been hand chiseled between 500 BC and AD 800 and presumably transported from a distant rock quarry to the present site.

The site reminded me of standing out in the countryside in England and trying to figure out why the massive rocks of Stonehenge were balanced as they were. Who carved the massive stone jars on this plain in Laos? How were they used? How were they transported? What civilization placed them on this plain? What happened to some of the lids that used to cover them? Did they bury people in the jars? Did they store water in them? There were thousands of the megalithic vessels around the Xieng Khouang area, but no conclusive answers to the questions about them.

Traditional Lao legends tell the story of a race of giants ruled by a king called Khun Jeuam. The king fought long and valiantly against an enemy, and after gaining the victory, he supposedly created the jars to brew and store huge amounts of rice wine for celebration.

 According to another local legend, the jars were molded from natural materials such as clay, sand, or animal products rather than carved from stone. Many Lao people believe that a nearby cave was actually used as a pottery kiln. Other legends claim that the jars collected rainwater for caravan travelers to use when water wasn’t available.

In the 1930s, French archaeologist Madeleine Colani excavated the site and concluded that the stone jars were likely used in prehistoric times as funeral urns. Colani also discovered bronze and iron tools around the jars, as well as bracelets and other artifacts that could have been burial objects. Since that time, archaeologists have discovered evidence of human remains, which would seem to validate Colani’s theory. A nearby limestone cave is thought to have been used as a crematorium, and two man-made holes on top may have served as chimneys. Archaeological evidence seems to support this theory as well.

Based on the archaeological evidence, it’s entirely possible that the Plain of Jars was an ancient burial site. Artifacts found both inside and outside the cave—including broken pottery, iron and bronze objects, glass beads, bone fragments, and burnt teeth—suggest that this is the most likely explanation.  Another use for the urns may have been for distilling corpses before cremation. In modern times, corpses of Thai, Cambodian, and Lao royalty are initially placed in urns, where their spirits gradually transition to the afterlife before the bodies are cremated and buried.

While exploring the megalithic archaeological landscape in Laos, I kept wondering what I could learn about empty jars and cracked pots. One thing I did know was that there certainly was a lot of confusion about the mission and message of the ancient traditions and practices. It was muddled and hidden enough that no one could really be certain now, even though it was incredibly important to the folks involved back then.

I concluded that the genius to be discovered is that compassion isn’t a megalithic jar to be filled but a fire to be kindled. When that fire is ignited, and its energy and warmth are focused on a needy place like Laos or Cambodia, the white-hot flame will be extended not just into the years ahead but into eternity as well.

Project C.U.R.E. volunteers, who spend their energies passionately collecting, sorting, warehousing, and distributing medical goods to bring health and hope to people around the world, are indeed messengers. They are human vessels with a message that won’t be forgotten. The collective vessel is filled with the pulsing heartbeat of more than fifteen thousand individuals who compassionately love and care for others.

                 Hope can do exceeding good for the vessel in which it’s stored,
                 then multiply that goodness whereever it is freely poured.

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MEMORIES

Memories come in different shapes, colors, and intensity. Some are wonderful, some are awful. One of the most pleasurable memories I garnered from decades of international travel was when my host in Tanzania favored me with an exotic hot-air balloon safari over the incomparable African Serengeti.

At 4:00 a.m. I was taken in a Land Rover across the African plains to where our majestic, glowing balloon was coming alive. Super-heated gases were being blasted into the still-limp balloon. The sky was beginning to lighten, and faint colors of orange and pink bounced off the fluffy African clouds.

Once we were settled in the balloon’s wicker basket, and the cotton ropes that tethered us to earth were loosened, we began to slowly ascend above the branches of the acacia trees.

The pilot took us to a height of about two thousand feet. We viewed the vast number of animals on the floor of the Serengeti: herds of wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles; prides of lions returning from their nightly hunting expeditions; cheetahs; hyenas; elephants; and giraffes.

The pilot picked out a herd below and maneuvered the supersilent balloon beneath the treetops, where we could have reached out and touched the animals. Of course, when the pilot decided to ascend, the sharp blast of the gas burner scattered the herd, and we rose once more, high enough to pick another group of animals from the ecosystem to visit. The thrill of our two-hour, early morning balloon ride, as the sun began to bathe the Serengeti and the adrenalin rush from observing so many wild animals close at hand in their morning routines, filled my emotional-memory reservoir to flood stage. I’ll never forget that October morning.

The process of our minds that encodes, stores, and retrieves such Serengeti experiences is called memory. It’s a lot like a cell-phone camera in our hearts that makes special moments last forever. It’s a way of holding on to important things we don’t want to lose.

As Edward de Bono once said, “A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.” Memory also has a way of encoding, storing, and retrieving a bit of heaven from which we cannot be driven, as well as a bit of hell from which we cannot escape. The nondiscriminating memory processes the bad things as well as the good.

Shortly after that delightful trip to Tanzania, I had an absolutely devastating trip to Belgrade, Serbia, in the former Yugoslavia. I was driven to the City of Nis, where thousands of refugees were seeking protection from the Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo massacres. Project C.U.R.E. had agreed to help by donating medical goods to the refugee centers. Nis had set up fifteen refugee locations.

Our first stop was at an old, crumbling hotel in lower downtown.The doctor with us from the ministry of health succinctly warned me, “Most of these people have already died inside in order to survive.” They had walked to Nis trying to escape getting shot in cold blood during the ethnic cleansing.

We started on the top floor of the hotel. A man and his family of eight, including his elderly parents, lived in one small room that had been a closet. They were surviving on macaroni. The man told me that gunmen came to his house one day and ordered him to leave right then with his family, or they would line them all up and shoot them. He was told he could leave his blind father and elderly mother behind, and they would kill them for him because they knew the old couple would slow them down. As the family left, the men ransacked their house for any valuables and then burned the house and outbuildings so the family could never return to Kosovo. As the family walked north, they turned and watched as all their earthly possessions went up in flames.That family was part of approximately eight hundred thousand victims forced to flee Kosovo.

As we stood in the hallway of the fourth floor, we were surrounded by women who looked very old. I was told that some were still in their forties.

One woman from Kosovo had watched as her husband and sons were shot. Then she and her daughters were raped as they fled their home. Through her tears and occasional sobs, she shared with me the memories of the beautiful flowers she had loved at her home in Kosovo.

“They burned everything,” she told me. “I have nothing. Now I write poems, but there is no one left to read them or listen to me.”

On another floor, a younger woman ran to her room and brought back some sort of diploma to show me. The paper was watermarked and stained, and the frame had no glass. Along with the framed document, she held two pieces of broken glass. She stroked the surface of the glass gently as if she were touching the soft skin of a baby’s face.

As she stared at the glass, the pilot light of her memory sputtered in her eyes. “This is all I have left of my life and my family. Now I have nothing, and no one is left. I’m not sure how I came here. I am lost.”

Some memories are wonderful . . .  some memories are awful. Sometimes we have a choice about what memories we’ll store . . . and sometimes we don’t. However, I decided while standing in the old Hotel Park in Nis that I would actively choose to gather and store an abundance of good memories in my memory reservoir. I needed enough good memories to far outweigh the possibility of bad memories I might acquire.

I challenge you to intentionally build a beautiful memory today that will keep and sustain you through all of your tomorrows.

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ENOUGH ALREADY, ABOUT BURMA: Post Script and Tag Line

Note to Readers:  We’ve already spent 10 Blogs in a row about the awesome land of Burma and the miracles we encountered between the years 1998 and 2001. Your responses have been wonderful! I have, however, decided not to continue with the formal “Travel Journal” presentations we’ve been doing on Burma (Myanmar). Instead, I just want to summarize the travel trips through 2003 in this Blog, and in a very brief fashion, let you in on how incredibly the mission of Project C.U.R.E. turned out in that part of the world.

We faithfully and patiently kept on helping Daniel Kalnin and his “Barefoot Doctors” throughout the dangerous insurgency areas in the north. Now, they had access to medical supplies and pieces of medical equipment that they never dreamed of having in their towns and village clinics.

Eventually, the word began getting back to the formal government officials in Rangoon and Mandalay. The heads of the main hospitals and the Health Ministry personnel began asking why they were not also getting access to such expensive and updated medical goods from this Project C.U.R.E. group in USA?

Then the day came when we were formally invited to come and perform the necessary needs assessment studies on the major hospitals – including the big 1500 bed hospital in the capital city of Rangoon. We jumped at the chance. It was another day of fulfilled dreams for my friend, Daniel Kalnin.

Once the assessments were made, the inventories to be gifted agreed upon, all the customs problems worked out, and the signatures in place, Project C.U.R.E.’s people back in the USA began loading the 40-foot ocean-going cargo containers with all the life-saving medical goods – not just for Daniel’s group, but for the entire country!

I was in Cambodia doing needs assessments there and in Laos, when word came to me that the three Military Generals that run the country, and the other Government Leaders of Myanmar, were insisting that I come back to Rangoon and make a formal presentation of the millions of dollars’ worth of health care goods. The presentation would be to the entire host of Government Officials and Leaders of the country. Daniel and I got our heads together and decided on an appropriate date.

When I arrived in Rangoon, I found that the officials had already collected all the goods of the last two container loads from the port and had carefully inventoried them and temporarily stored them at the “Central Medical Stores Depot.” Dr. Myint Thoung told me that they were treating all the medical goods as priceless treasures. A cross section sampling of the medical goods and pieces of equipment would be polished and transferred by trucks to the large presentation venue for the celebration.

As Daniel and I approached the Government Buildings where the celebration would be held, Colonel U Kyi Tun, the Cabinet Member who had finally given me official permission to travel into the restricted areas on my original trip, came up to me wildly chattering and smiling and shaking my hand. He recalled how I had convinced him that I should receive the permission . . . “and now, just look at what all has happened,” he said warmly.

There was lots of Pomp and Circumstance that accompanied the presentation ceremony. The Burmese chefs had prepared a banquet of scrumptious selections of food. Sample items of the donated medical goods were displayed around the perimeter of the formal hall.

General Khin Nyunt was at the seat of honor. He was the Chief of Intelligence. He was also the Chairman of the Peace and Development Council, and Chairman of the Health Committee. They referred to him as “Secretariat #1”.

We were introduced and Daniel and I were given the opportunity to say a few words and present our Certificates of Donation to them. General Khin Nyunt then spoke and presented to us their Certificates of Thanks and Appreciation to us. Every one, including the excited Minister of Health, Dr. Kyan Myint, and the Minister of the Military, General Abel, gathered around us to get better acquainted with us and ask questions regarding the future relationship.

I stepped back and tried to take a mental picture so I would never forget that experience. I was seeing history in the making. It was a miracle. Just a short time before no one could even get into the restricted areas. And now, the access doors to the whole country had been flung widely open for Project C.U.R.E. What else would it have taken to allow Daniel Kalnin, a fugitive and criminal, to now be such an honored guest? It was nothing less than God’s direct intervention into the situation.

Later, that evening in my hotel room I was reflecting on what had taken place. God seemed to bring back to my memory a verse of scripture He had given to me on an earlier trip to Burma:

“This message is sent to you by the one who is holy and true, and has the key of David to open what no one can shut and shut what no one can open.
“I know you well; you aren’t strong, but you have tried to obey and have not denied my Name. Therefore, I have opened a door to you that no one can shut.” (Revelations 3:7-8, TLB).

An Update: We are still working in Myanmar (old Burma). Just recently, one of our Project C.U.R.E. “Needs Assessors” returned from Rangoon in preparation for sending even more precious medical goods into the needy country.

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BURMA - UNFORGETTABLE STORIES Travel Journals: Feb. 1998: Nov. 2001: Feb. 2003: Oct. 2003: Part 10

Putao, Kachin State, Burma: November 18, 2001: As our time in old Burma came to an end, I was actually beginning to enjoy my early morning bath in the steamy little bathhouse with the wooden floor, open gable ends, and cauldrons of hot, refreshing water in a cauldron, ready for me to dip out and pour over my weary body. I was also beginning to enjoy standing around the early morning bonfire near the outdoor kitchen with a hot cup of Burmese tea, getting dry and warm after my bath.

If I should ever disappear, you might come looking for me in the pristine high-mountain jungles of Burma. With my tall stature, Scotch-Irish red hair, and light skin color, I wouldn’t be hard to find, but my spirit would, no doubt, blend in remarkably well.

We would be leaving Putao on Sunday for our return trip to Myitkyina and then on to Rangoon. For our last big meal together, Phe Ram had sent two of his trusted men into the Himalayan Mountains to an area where the wildlife is plentiful. He gave them explicit instructions to shoot a large elk-like animal and return with the meat for our Sunday meal. 

The hunting area is quite a distance from Phe Ram’s home. The trip requires one long day’s journey by bicycle, and then the men need to camp overnight and walk another day to reach the area where they hunt the game. Counting on the fact that two very experienced hunters would be successful in bagging the game, they would still have to clean and butcher it before walking back to where they had left their bicycles and then riding another full day to Phe Ram’s home, where Chin Le Doo would oversee the preparations of the trophy meat.

Just a couple of hours after the trusted hunters returned to the village with the meat, we gathered for our farewell meal. I could see Phe Ram breathe a sigh of relief as the men came riding through the wooden gates. I was so very impressed on this trip with how much the Burmese people did to please us and be good hosts and hostesses for their guests.

I had to discreetly leave behind many of the gifts that the village leaders and residents gave me, including bottles of cliff honey, woven baskets, bamboo walking sticks, and hand-woven linens. There just wasn’t enough room to pack them all for the journey out.

When Daniel, Ma Lay, and I left Putao and finally arrived in Myitkyina, Daniel’s sister was at the airport with some of her friends to meet us. They knew that the airplane, which we would be taking back to Rangoon, stopped in Myitkyina before flying on to Mandalay and then back to Myitkyina. She had brought to the airport hot tea and little sweet cakes and suggested we get off the airplane, have tea with her while the plane flew to Mandalay and back. Then we could reboard and fly on to Rangoon. What a brilliant and thoughtful suggestion. 

As we flew back to Rangoon, I looked out the window and noted all the footprints of British civilization that are still observable in Myanmar. I realize that what I’m going to write here is politically incorrect. I know that our global culture is presently all caught up in victimization and revisionist theories. But the more I travel around the world in countries like Myanmar, India, the United States, and the checkerboard countries of Africa, the more impressed I’ve become with the impact and influence the little island country of England had on the world in such a relatively short period of time.

It’s quite popular now to bad-mouth Queen Victoria and Albert and the British Commonwealth, but if you were to go back today and note the cultural and economic advantages of the British Empire that still act as positive influences in those colonized countries, I’m sure you would agree that it is nothing short of amazing. How did such a little country accomplish all of that? 

While the rest of the world was stumbling through a lot of historic uncertainty and fog, Great Britain was establishing principles of law and order, courthouses, law libraries, and, yes, even jails and theaters in countries far from its own shores.

Many in Burma didn’t want the Brits and all their order, civility, and modern methods to pull out and sail back to England. The people of Burma never had it so good.

Whenever I travel throughout India, I can’t even imagine that country’s economic predicament today had the English not built the railroad system across the country. Those railroads permit the movement of goods and products to marketplaces throughout India. And if the British hadn’t built docks and seaports, India might still be struggling today with inadequate internal transport systems, as is the case in Brazil.

Only now is Zimbabwe realizing that crops and farms and managed economics don’t just happen by themselves as the country tries to figure out how to keep its people from starving to death.

Myanmar is still the positive recipient of what the British left in place, even after all these years. And admittedly, as of today the people of old Burma haven’t added a lot to what the British left more than fifty years ago.

If I should ever talk openly about the “golden years” of many countries around the world that benefited from European influence, words like rape, pillage, and muffled mutterings of reparations would no doubt be hurled at me. But nonetheless, I still have to admit that I admire England’s vivid stamp in the history of nation building. Even on this trip, I’ve talked with many Burmese people who voluntarily and sincerely wish that they were still receiving the benefits of English progress that are now long gone.

For me, the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. The final night in Rangoon, Daniel, Ma Lay, and I decided to go to a quaint restaurant on the outskirts of town. Not many people travel to Southeast Asia, almost no one travels to Myanmar, and even fewer make it to Rangoon.

Only twenty people could be seated at a time in the restaurant. Ten minutes after we had been seated, a man walked up to me and said, “You’re Jim Jackson, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I replied. “And just what are the odds that I would meet you here?”

The man represents a faith-based organization just outside London, and we had worked on a couple of projects together in the past. It’s a small, small world!

After leaving Daniel and all my new friends in Myanmar, I flew from Rangoon to Bangkok, Thailand. There I boarded a Thai Airways flight back to Los Angeles via Japan.

No sooner was I seated than a man came up to me and said, “Hi, Jim Jackson.”

It was John Pudaite, with whom I traveled to Mizoram, Manipur, and Nagaland in the country of India! I guess it could be said that the sun never sets on the friends of Project C.U.R.E. They are everywhere!

I thanked God over and over again for the unique opportunity to help my dear friend, Daniel Kalnin see his fondest dreams come true in being able to travel once again to his beloved Burma and deliver trained “barefoot doctors” and millions of dollars worth of desperately needed medical supplies and pieces of medical equipment to his friends and family in that beautiful land. What a joy and privilege! 

I truly believe that Project C.U.R.E. is going to bring a lot of additional hope and wonderful change to the lives of all our new friends in old Burma.

Next Week: A Quick Summary of our 2003 Miracles in Burma

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