“It’s too intense to maintain for more than two weeks,” said Islesford lobsterman Ted Spurling, Jr. of his volunteer work as a translator for a medical mission. That goes for many of the people on the Maine coast who give their time to help those less fortunate. Some do their volunteering through churches, others through secular groups, but all pay their own way and are bent on helping their fellow human beings.
Karen Harrison, R.N., of Verona Island, works in Bangor in a pain management clinic she started seven years ago with Peter Leong, M.D. Leong, who was born in Burma, now Myanmar, is a lay minister at the Wesleyan church in Bangor. Harrison and her husband, David, a merchant mariner, belong to the Orrington Congregational Church.
Leong has been making trips to the border country of Northeast India to treat the Mizo, a Christian tribe of Mongolian hill people living near the Burma border. He holds his own doctor-without-borders-type clinic, arriving yearly with nurses, medicine, money for medicine, and used-but-still-useful eyeglasses.
Harrison had wanted to go with Leong back in 2001, but after the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of a church in India that killed a number of Christian women, her husband objected.
Harrison kept after him anyway. “I was getting older,” she recalled on a bright spring day, looking out on the Penobscot River from her light-filled living room. “I was enveloped with such a feeling of need to experience something beside our cloistered, safe life.”
David Harrison, though, remained reluctant. “I had made three trips around the world including India and Pakistan after graduating from the Maine Maritime Academy,” he said. “I had seen the poverty and the degrading way [people] live. I came back troubled. I thought whatever I tried to do would be ineffective.”
It took the approval of the Bangor Wesleyan church’s pastor – the church was helping to fund the trip – for David Harrison to withdraw his opposition.
Dr. Leong, Karen Harrison, three other nurses and a nurse’s teenaged daughter made up the team that held a one-week clinic this past February. Travel took another seven days. Harrison said her back still hurt from dragging body bags filled with medicines. Air India waived about $1,000 of overweight fees.
The team brought medicines from the U.S., money to purchase medicines in India, and 800 pairs of glasses and “good” sunglasses. Harrison said the glasses were gone in two days. “We could have brought 4,000,” she said. The teenager fitted glasses and gave out medicine.
With the help of interpreters, the nurses each took on a subject, teaching alcohol and drug education, AIDS prevention and hygiene. Harrison said Dr. Leong worked one-on-one to teach basic health care, “so people would know when to go to the pharmacy to get Maalox or when to go to a physician.” Leong, with nursing support, taught the locals how to take blood pressure and how to treat parasites, ulcers, wounds and tuberculosis.
The Mizoram people were suspicious, Harrison admitted, but they allowed the doctor and nurses in because they belong to the same church. “We were coming to them,” she explained. “We said, ‘What can we do to help you?’ They didn’t have to ask for help. They were very open to anything we taught.”
The orphanage in Aizwal, the capital of the Mizoram area, holds 400 children. “They’re perfect,” Harrison said. “Perfect, perfect, perfect. They were so perfect, it was scary. They were immaculate, sitting lined up on dirt floors.” She showed a photo of a kid with bleached, spiked hair and another photo of a baby playing with Harrison’s eyeglasses.
Part of the institution is a mental hospital, but the team was not able to do more than physical intervention. As for drug and alcohol addicts – the Mizoram have access to the same drugs as in the U.S. – “There are no methadone clinics in this area of India,” Harrison said. “They get over it by prayer and group therapy or they do not survive.”
Harrison found the trip enormously rewarding and is raising money to go back in a year or two. She paid her own way in February. It cost about $1,600.
Evangelizing
Lobsterman and poundkeeper Bruce Portrie of Harrington is also a minister and evangelist with the Church of God who does what he calls, “Billy Graham stuff” with his wife, Patricia, each February for three weeks in the Philippines, where he works mostly on the island of Mindanao and occasionally on Samar and Leyte. He’s also evangelized in Israel.
The Portries go with a group called Souls For Christ, from Bakersfield, CA, part of the Assembly of God. Portrie’s brother-in-law is a minister with that group.
Portrie and his group bring donated funds, computers for schools, and have bought vehicles for pastors in churches on these islands.
“We’ve tried to meet educational needs,” Portrie said; “that’s the main focus.”
Last year, his group took over a run-down, closed Bible school. “We regenerated it,” he said. “We painted, re-cemented, plastered it. We hired staff. Now we have 40 bible students. This is our plan, to educate locals so they can go amongst them and spread the good news.” He said every bit of money used has been donated through churches from Maine to California.
“Anyone with a willing heart” who would like to go to the Philippines with his group is welcome, Portrie said, but must pay his or her own way. Plane fare is about $1,600 and expenses for hopping from island to island come to an additional $800.
Building Houses
Innkeepers Jeffrey and Judith Burke of The Keeper’s House on Isle au Haut are former Peace Corps volunteers who served as a married couple in Venezuela from 1965 to 1967. Once their three children were grown, the Burkes went back to volunteering and have spent time for the past ten winters in Central and South America and at present are building a house for Habitat for Humanity in Guyton, Georgia, their second Habitat project.
They’ve been to Cuba with Pastors for Peace, where they delivered medical aid collected in Maine. They’ve been to Honduras twice, through the Sea Coast Missionary Society of Bar Harbor, building houses for flood victims. They’ve been to two places in Guatemala with Witness for Peace, which was educational for the Burkes, who both speak fluent Spanish. There they met with community groups to see if their civil rights were being honored.
They made two other trips with H.O.M.E., Inc. of Orland, primarily to develop an Emmaus community, boosting the local economy though marketing arts and crafts. “Judi and I work with schools there, too,” said Burke. “We brought $1,000 [from donations, with which] they were able to build a deep-water well.” The Burkes and H.O.M.E. have also started an exchange of students between the village of Comalapa and Isle au Haut.
The Burkes have also worked with the Chiapas Indians of Mexico. Jeffrey Burke said, “Like native peoples anywhere, they have to fight to preserve their local autonomy and natural resources.”
They helped build a school in Belize, brought solar cells from Maine Solar Energy Corp. in Jonesport to Nicaragua, which they installed in a school.
“That trip inspired the use of solar energy at the lighthouse,” said Judi Burke, who added, “If you do volunteer, it’s not so much that you’re a wonderful person, but you learn from other people and other cultures.”
“I think [making these trips] is very important to us,” agreed Jeff Burke. “It keeps our horizons open and gives us a very fundamental understanding about people around the world,”
Like the other volunteers, the Burkes pay their own way.
Medical Missions
Lobsterman Ted Spurling, Jr., and his wife, architect Jeri Spurling, of Islesford, volunteer their time and often include their three school-age daughters in medical missions to Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
Every winter since 1997, Ted has volunteered for two weeks as a translator with the Hancock County Medical Mission, a Doctors-Without-Borders kind of operation. “I’m not fluent,” he said, “but I’m proficient enough. It’s a real break to get away from Maine in February, but also, it’s doing good for other people.” To do so costs him about $1,600 for air fare, housing and travel in the country. “We save up,” he said, “and fundraising, and donations from churches, friends, and family offset a lot, if not all, of the cost.”
The mission consists of 30 people: doctors, nurses, anesthesia providers, surgeons, dentists, translators, general helpers, and two to three teenagers on scholarship who have three years of Spanish. Spurling said the teenagers have, in the past, gone on to International Studies or Medicine as a result of their Ecuador medical mission experience.
Working through the American Baptist Churches of Maine, Jeri Spurling designed a school and church for a Haitian community in the Dominican Republic and helped build the school during spring vacation.
The Haitians are the poorest of the poor, with no citizenship rights, no medical care, so a lot of churches have their own schools. Tanis Derolus, a Haitian who had come to work in the Dominican Republic, became a pastor, and, with his wife, started his own church and school in his house. Two hundred children were attending classes under tarps strung together.
Derolus had made friends with the U.S. mission participants, so he called on them and they responded. Jeri Spurling’s last construction and evangelism trip consisted of a team of 19 people who raised money through their church and fundraisers to pay their way. Ted Spurling said, “It’s encouraging to see Jeri’s trips grow with return volunteers.”
Karen Harrison summed up everyone’s experience when she said, “It’s the most life-enhancing thing.” She can’t wait to go back. All the do-gooders want to go back. They all want to repeat what they consider an enormously rewarding experience.