Contributed
Marian Stewart (left) and Dr Coril Curtis-Warmington.
Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
It began as a mentoring relationship but now Dr Coril Curtis-Warmington and Marian Stewart are partners in a venture to spread the Christian gospel in Liberia while attending to some of the health needs there.
A few months after becoming a born-again Christian in 2002, Marian Stewart joined Emmanuel Baptist Church in St Andrew. But her spiritual hunger was intense. She wanted to learn more biblical truth than was being taught her on Sundays and in the midweek Bible study. Her then pastor, Errol Lewis, hooked her up with Dr Curtis-Warmington, who he regarded as a mature Christian with good abilities to mentor Marian. The two met regularly and a bond was developed.
Then with the encouragement of their pastor, the two attended a missions conference in Montego Bay. The conference was organised by local Independent Baptist churches and had, as its main speaker, Dr Michael Loftis, the president of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE). The two ladies left the conference with a sense that God was speaking to them to be engaged in cross-cultural evangelism. They prayed about the matter and doors began to open up for them. They met with ABWE officials who were enthusiastic to facilitate them getting on the mission field. The two were invited in 2006 to attend to the United States - first to attend a medical missions conference in July and then to receive orientation in jungle medicine and surgery practices in October of that year.
Three years later
Then in November 2006, three years after the missions conference in Montego Bay, the two, as part of a team of six from the ABWE, set foot on Liberian soil.
Liberia is a on the west coast of Africa, and since 1989, has had two civil wars, 1989-1996 and 1999-2003. Thousands of persons were displaced and infrastructure and the economy were devastated.
The plane carrying the two Jamaicans touched down in the capital Monrovia at night on a runway which was barely lit. Monrovia was itself barely lit. The roads had horrible potholes - far worse than what the two had seen or experienced in Jamaica. They were then transported to the home of a host pastor and there they spent the night.
Then they were taken to the Liberian ABWE mission house in a community called Gbainga where they stayed. Not far from where they stayed was a building which housed a clinic (otherwise referred to as a fixed clinic). At other times, the team went deep into the jungle and offered medical services with the aid of a mobile clinic.
It was at that fixed clinic that Dr Curtis-Warmington and Stewart did most of their ministry. The two, along with other members of the visiting missions team, worked out an elaborate system where they would attend to medical needs while at the same time share the gospel.
Devotions
Each morning the ladies would wake up at 5 o'clock and then make their own breakfast and then head to the clinic. At the clinic, as the first order of business, as hundreds assembled there, was devotions which would be conducted for about 15 minutes by a team member.
At the clinic, Stewart, a former managing director of Aero International Shipping Ltd - a freight forwarding company, worked as an administrator, while Dr Curtis-Warmington, a medical doctor with more than 20 years' experience, attended to hundreds of patients daily.
The day's regiment at the fixed clinic was something like this:
Patients entering the clinic would be registered and asked to take simple blood and urine tests.
Patients would have their vital signs checked by a physician's assistant.
Patients would then see a doctor.
The doctor would treat and make prescriptions.
At each step of the way, team members would seek to offer spiritual counsel where patients demonstrated an openness to hear the gospel. The ministry at the fixed clinic was particularly fruitful, the two ladies reported, as eight out of every 10 persons, they saw, surrendered their lives to Christ.
Dr Curtis-Warmington reported scary moments as she fulfilled her role as physician in Liberia. About 90 per cent of the patients had either malaria, worms or both. Some had typhoid. And some had all three. Dr Curtis-Warmington, despite having been vaccinated before she got to Liberia, was nevertheless worried that she could contract these virulent strain of diseases.
The worms were particularly scary. She recounted that in many cases, one could actually see worms moving under the patients' skin and even in their eyeballs.
Recurring problems
From the patients' dockets, Dr Curtis-Warmington and Stewart realised that many were coming to the clinics to be treated for problems that were recurring. They explained that the villagers, though 90 per cent illiterate, were in need of community health education. The villagers, for example, after being treated often went back to the same polluted water sources and thereby reinfected themselves with water-borne diseases, Dr Curtis-Warming-ton said.
The work of influencing the conversion of the villagers did not sit well with all. Some of the people resident there, who the ladies claimed worshipped demons, sought to derail their spiritual ministry by instigating a satanic attack. One night, Dr Curtis-Warmington reported, she got a vision from the Lord warning that Marian's life would be put in danger. That night, some villagers who were worshipped demons stood outside the mission house and chanted for several hours, calling down curses on the missions team. The following night, Marian mysteriously took ill. She had an extremely high fever and was sick and nearing death. Dr Curtis-Warmington said she stood over Marian and cried out to the Lord all night for her recovery and by daybreak her friend was back to full health.
The two made significant personal adjustments while there. They did not wear pants as it was unwelcomed in that conservative culture. They were without running water while at Gbainga.
According to Stewart, being in Liberia influenced a reordering of personal priorities and as such affected material and spiritual things. Having seen much lack in Liberia, the two ladies on their return to Jamaica were influenced to live more simply and humbly. They reported having a better grasp of what is important vis á vis the superficial.
The two women returned to Liberia with the ABWE team in 2007. On both occasions they spent two weeks in that African nation. On the second visit, they spent most of their time in the deep jungles where they deployed a mobile clinic. Several more persons availed themselves of the medical services in the deep rural areas, they said. But things were a lot less structured and the evangelism component was not as vibrant as it was at the fixed clinic.
Liberia is firmly on their minds and hearts. They have devised a 10-year development plan for their ministry there. They hope to put in place a pilot project for community health evangelism.
Infrastructure
The first segment of the plan covers the period 2008-2013 where they hope to lay the infrastructure for a community health evangelism programme. They will be meeting with the government officials to hear from them what the needs are in conjunction with what they themselves have observed in villages. The duo have already identified the village that will be the pilot and the elders from that community who they want to involve in the project. The second phase of the plan, 2013-2018, involves the two ladies physically relocating to Liberia to implement/ manage the community health evangelism programme. They expect that while there, the project will properly train several villagers. Thereafter, they anticipate that the programme will become a template to be adopted by other communities all across Africa.
Stewart resigned from her post at Aero International in 2004 and formed a consultancy. This allowed her more time to focus on ministry-related matters. Then in 2006, she went into full-time ministry with the formation of Faith & Deeds Ministries (www.faithanddeeds.org), a parachurch ministry set-up in partnership with Dr Curtis-Warmington. Through Faith & Deeds, the two seek to structure and organise their mission engagement. The ministry also offers a wide range of counselling services.
With offices in Mandeville, Faith & Deeds Ministries also seeks to involve other Jamaican Christians for ministry in Liberia. In that respect, there is an application form available on its website.
The two believe God has called them to do ministry in Africa. Liberia for them is just a gateway to other countries on the continent.
Send feedback to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com Marian Stewart and Dr Coril Curtis-Warmington may be reached at faithanddeeds@cwjamaica.com.
