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Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Prayer Request: Clinic Update

Hey thank you so much for your faithful prayers!
I wanted to give you all an update with our clinic in Manila. Our director (Vicki) got back from PH last night and the current state is that the clinic is still closed (they have received a Cease and Desist order). The officials are saying that we failed a sanitary inspection (and just as a sidenote, the way to solve the sanitary issue is the removal of the foreigners!!). Also our directors could face criminal charges for practicing midwifery without a licence (to explain: they are licenced midwives, they attempted to register in PH and could not, and were told that was fine). Technically the law in PH states that to practice midwifery a women not only has to act as a midwife, but receive pay for her services. We never charge for our services, therefore, none of our midwives are technically performing midwifery.
Have I thoroughly confused you yet?? I'm just trying to give you the facts, I don't exactly know how to connect the dots.
In normal operation every birth in our clinic is overseen by a Filipina midwife, and even now these midwives cannot practice. Right now all foreigners (midwife students, etc.) have left the area, some are joining other ministries throughout PH. And we are hoping that the clinic can reopen just for births to be run by the Filipinas and a Filipino doctor. Because right now, every day women are coming to our clinic, IN LABOUR, and are being turned away! After all of the hospitals have turned them away, after they have travelled long distances, we still have to send them home! It is awful for them and their babies, and it is awful for everyone who has to explain to them that we can not help.
So, the goal is that the clinic will eventually reopen, the sooner the better. We have a Christian lawyer in PH who is working on our case, and trying to get a judge to read the laws to interpret them. (Apparently the exact details are in question). This case could be a landmark either way - we want it to open the doors for other ministries and NGOs to get into PH and provide midwifery without any hassels.
At this point we don't know what this Fall will look like. I am schedule to go in the first group of students, leaving in mid-September. But if the clinic is not open we are going to look into other options. I don't have a lot of details on that right now. But we're waiting and hoping, praying and trusting!
So there are a lot of things that I have said here. Sorry, I'm not very organized at the moment. Hopefully you can find the prayer requests in what I've said. There are so many things to pray. But we trust God - He is not going to allow any official to throw off His plan, or to stop His work from being accomplished. Amen!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're faith is incredible. So glad I could be here to witness this. Thanks Kim!