These are the Lengths They Will go

“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”

So said a member of our medical mission team on the third day of our 2015 medical outreach to minister to the very special Lemba people of Mberengwa, Zimbabwe.

The sun was just rising, yet the lines outside our clinic gate were already beginning to form.

That’s when they saw it, a battered, green, two-wheeled cart being pulled up the dusty dirt path by a team of four donkeys.

As the cart drew closer, our team saw that it carried a half-dozen Lemba women of various ages, all in desperate need of medical help.

A young relative of one of the women had driven these suffering ladies many miles through the dangerous Zimbabwe night to get them the help they urgently needed.

But there was more to come that morning . . .

Not much later, another cart bearing the sick and suffering made its way up the road — this one pulled by two oxen. And behind it? . . .

An elderly man pushing his ailing wife in a wheelbarrow.

He had carried her in it from another Lemba village miles away — up and down the hilly terrain.

I have enclosed photos of each of these — as well as the long lines of Lemba people that formed in the hot sun on our last visit to Mberengwa — because I need to find to way to communicate something very important to you today.

Namely, that as we prepare for our next medical and ministry outreach to the Lemba people of Mberengwa . . .

. . . we know the needs we will face there will be almost overwhelming.

The lines will be long. And as word of our impending arrival begins to spread among the Lemba villages, many will do almost anything to get a loved one to our clinic...