Medical Missions conference

Over 2000 people! They were all either medical missionaries, or people interested in medical missions. 3 days of hearing the wisdom being passed down from experienced missionaries!

Started my first day with a class on tropical medicine, talking about malaria and worms etc. Later a class on medical education, lots of booths to look at at talk to so many people! Lots of mission opportunities!

Samaritain Purse has a mobile hospital all set up for us to walk through and see what they do. The hospital is like a giant bounce house, they blow up. It has heat and air conditioning. It has oxygen put in place. 1st room is triage, next room is procedure room and the next one is an actual OR. The last room is where they sterilize instruments and clean up.

Only half the volunteers on the DART team is medical. They also need people that do construction, engineering, cooks and all sorts of people to keep the hospital running. Volunteers for the dart program get on a list and are trained for emergency situations where they’re setting up a temporary hospital somewhere. generally the deployment is for 4 weeks or so.

I can think of a lot of people that would enjoy taking a break from their normal job to join a dart deployment!

Some of the classes I took were hands on ultrasound, suturing, how to deal with a grief protocol for the provider, ethics on the mission field . We had tons of choices each session.

There were probably over 100 booths of people telling you about their ministry. Water filters, schools, mission sending ministries , people with clinics needing help. It was so fun to visit and think of all the opportunities!

It was held in a huge church and they provided most of our meals. Church members put up those of us traveling. My host drove me back and forth each day and gave me a beautiful bedroom to stay in!