by Tina | Jul 9, 2015 | Devotional
Dear Friends, I decided that once in a while I am going to post a song that affected me at a particular junction in life and affected me deep down to my core. This is a picture of a Children’s Sunday School room here in Nigeria. We do not even have flannel graph here!
About 1993 one of my then favorite musicians, Geoff Moore, came out with an album entitled “Home Run”. I loved this whole album and we even went to see them in concert. On that record was a song, “Tell Me Again”. Here are the lyrics, just read them, or google the YouTube Video (which they won’t let me post here). There is a version posted by Will Ellett that I just love. Read the lyrics, they always give me a word picture that reaches straight into my heart and pulls~
“Tell Me Again”
(Words and Music by Geoff Moore and Steven Curtis Chapman)
Verse One
A little boy sitting on a metal folding chair,
In what appears to be a Sunday school room.
He could see that shepherd boy, His sling up in the air,
He could feel that giant hit with a boom.
In that room I saw the Red Sea part,
And two by two animals get in the ark.
And Mrs. Keen gently would say,
The God of the past is still God today.
Chorus
So tell me again of the old, old stories.
Tell me again of the faithful who walked,
In the lions’ den and the fiery furnace,
Of Noah and rainbows and donkeys that talked.
I don’t want to forget so please, tell me again.
Verse Two
A young man sitting at a desk with a wooden chair,
In what appears to be a high school class.
He can see a battlefield there’s giants everywhere
saying, “The Bible is a thing of the past”.
In this new age you believe what you want to believe.
‘Cause god is whatever you want it to be,
And I can hear Mrs. Keen gently say,
The God of the past is still God today.
Chorus
So tell me again of the old, old stories.
Tell me again of the faithful who walked,
In the lions’ den and the fiery furnace,
Of Noah and rainbows and donkeys that talked.
I don’t want to forget so please, tell me again.
Bridge
How the God of the ages,
Turned history’s pages and saw my need.
Tell me again of the shepherds and wise men,
And the star that would lead them to the baby who was born,
So that we could be born again.
Second Chorus
Tell me again of the Gospel story.
Tell me again how the whole world was lost.
How the Only Begotten with grace so amazing,
Gave up His life on an old rugged cross.
I don’t want to forget so please, tell me
Tell me again of the old, old stories.
Tell me again of the faithful who walked.
How the Only Begotten, with grace so amazing,
Gave up His life on an old rugged cross.
I don’t want to forget so please, tell me again.
I don’t want to forget, so please, tell me again.
It has been two years since I have worked with children now. It makes me sad. Sunday School in Nigeria is far different than in Minneapolis MN. I have just started a Bible Study with some teen girls and I hope to impart the same message that I have been for the last thirty years to children. I also have many plans for teaching and training church workers and am very excited about empowering the teachers here with our AWANA trainings and resources.
My point for today is this: Who are you sharing the message, “The God of the past is still God today” with?
by Tina | Jun 29, 2015 | Devotional
The ministry that we are at – Gembu Center for HIV/AIDS Nigeria (GECHAAN) is where Dan and I serve. Now that you know a little bit about HIV/AIDS I thought I would tell you how we are working to create awareness and treating those many people that are affected. One of the things we do here!
Currently we provide free testing, treating, and counselling for people when they come to us wanting a HIV test. We are one of the very few places for hundreds of miles that can do the CD4 test right here on sight. The person will be counselled, if HIV negative they are told how to stay that way. If HIV positive they are scheduled for the next three days for adherence class. This teaches them how they need to take their medications as prescribed, and not waver, also how to prevent transmitting HIV to another person. If pregnant, also how to help prevent the unborn baby from acquiring it. There is also nutritional training. This is very important because HIV affects your immune system. The things you can do to help it include taking your medication, exercise, and diet. In Nigeria there are many tribal myths about what you can do to “cure” AIDS. Of course, there is not a cure yet and these do much more damage then good. We work very hard at making sure anyone we come in contact with knows this and our counselors are very good at what they do .
In the past, through grants and programs GECHAAN has gone into remote villages and communities teaching, testing, and counselling many. This has contributed to a community that knows much more about HIV/AIDS and overall new cases are decreasing. GECHAAN has been synonymous with quality care in our area. We are working hard at making sure it stays that way and expanding our services.
What is the connection between medication adherence and drug resistance?
Taking HIV medicines every day prevents HIV from multiplying, which reduces the risk that HIV will mutate and produce drug-resistant HIV. Skipping HIV medicines allows HIV to multiply, which increases the risk of drug-resistant HIV developing.
Research shows that a person’s first HIV regimen offers the best chance for long-term treatment success. So adherence is important from the start—when a person first begins taking HIV medicines. Thus the counselling focus right at the start.
Typically, if a person gets to the point that no HIV medicines will work for him and his CD4 count is low, he will get Malaria, Typhoid, Pnuemonia, or something else and die from that. HIV/AIDS does not kill you. It weakens your immune system so another infection (co-morbidity) is what people will die from.
I hope this month’s blogs on HIV/AIDS have given you information that you possibly didn’t know and you can be a little more informed of what people living with this disease go through.
by Tina | Jun 25, 2015 | Devotional
PMTCT Preventing Mother To Child Transmission. This is a picture of a grandmother, her granddaughter, and granddaughters’ baby. This is the picture you should have in your mind when you think of the number one way that new cases of HIV/AIDS happen. Here is the story. The granddaughter had a baby boy (they named him Thankgod – I love that!) Then when the baby was about a week old the granddaughter came to the LifeLine Center because she wasn’t feeling well. The baby was also not feeling well. The grandmother showed me the baby and said with a beaming smile, “It’s a boy!”. We did a HIV test on the granddaughter and she is positive. It is too early to tell yet if the baby is positive and we have started the baby on Nevaripine, which reduces the baby’s risk about 50%. When the baby is six weeks old we can test and then monitor if he’s HIV positive.
Here in Nigeria many women have their baby at home, there are many reasons for this i.e. cost, knowledge, and accessiblity just to name a few. Because there is limited prenatal and medical care in developing countries, many women can be HIV positive and not know it all through their pregnancy. Delivering the baby and breastfeeding without any treatment on mother and child’s behalf results in a HIV positive child. 3.2 Million children worldwide are living with HIV because of this. People, knowledge is power! If every mother has access to pre-natal care and HIV testing and treatment, this would be prevented. These children are innocent!
How do HIV medicines prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV?
HIV medicines reduce the amount of HIV in the body. Having less HIV in the body reduces a woman’s risk of passing HIV to her baby during pregnancy and childbirth. Having less HIV in the body also also protects the woman’s health.
Some of the HIV medicine passes from the pregnant woman to her unborn baby across the placenta (also called the afterbirth). This transfer of HIV medicine protects the baby from HIV infection, especially during a vaginal delivery when the baby may be exposed to HIV in the mother’s blood or other fluids.
Babies born to women with HIV receive HIV medicine for 6 weeks after birth. The HIV medicine reduces the risk of infection from HIV that may have entered a baby’s body during childbirth.
Many children born HIV positive and not treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART), die before their fourth birthday.
We are working very hard to continue the work here at GECHAAN. Art and Dorothy Helwig, as well as the staff here have done so much to further the knowledge and resources of this area. Clients know that when they come to then Life Line Center, they will be treated with respect and get the care they need.
by Tina | Jun 17, 2015 | Devotional
The year was 1987 – I remember the day well! I was watching the Twins in the World Series and saw an informational piece on HIV. I was frightened as I could not believe there was a new disease that we didn’t know much about and there was no cure for it. How would this affect our children?
With knowledge there is power. That is part of what we do every day here in Nigeria. We give people the dignity to live life knowing how to prevent HIV or help them live healthy, vital lives and resources to take the fear out of the unknown. This is how this horrible disease started:
Scientists identified a type of chimpanzee in West Africa as the source of HIV infection in humans. They believe that the chimpanzee version of the immunodeficiency virus (called simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV) most likely was transmitted to humans and mutated into HIV when humans hunted these chimpanzees for meat and came into contact with their infected blood. Over decades, the virus slowly spread across Africa and later into other parts of the world.
The earliest known case of infection with HIV-1 in a human was detected in a blood sample collected in 1959 from a man in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (How he became infected is not known.) Genetic analysis of this blood sample suggested that HIV-1 may have stemmed from a single virus in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
In 1982 public health officials began to use the term “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” or AIDS, to describe the occurrences of opportunistic infections, Kaposi’s sarcoma (a kind of cancer), and Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia in previously healthy people. Formal tracking (surveillance) of AIDS cases began that year in the United States.
In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. This name was later changed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).
For many years scientists theorized as to the origins of HIV and how it appeared in the human population, most believing that HIV originated in other primates. Then in 1999, an international team of researchers reported that they had discovered the origins of HIV-1, the predominant strain of HIV in the developed world. A subspecies of chimpanzees native to west equatorial Africa had been identified as the original source of the virus. The researchers believe that HIV-1 was introduced into the human population when hunters became exposed to infected blood.
by Tina | Jun 12, 2015 | Devotional
This month I am going to do a series of blogs on HIV/AIDS. Before this journey I knew nothing about this virus. I didn’t need to because it didn’t affect me. Now I know and there will be no excuses!
WHAT IS HIV?
“HIV” stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. To understand what that means, let’s break it down:
- H – Human – This particular virus can only infect human beings.
- I – Immunodeficiency – HIV weakens your immune system by destroying important cells that fight disease and infection. A “deficient” immune system can’t protect you.
- V – Virus – A virus can only reproduce itself by taking over a cell in the body of its host.
HIV is a lot like other viruses, including those that cause the “flu” or the common cold. But there is an important difference – over time, your immune system can clear most viruses out of your body. That isn’t the case with HIV – the human immune system can’t seem to get rid of it. That means that once you have HIV, you have it for life.
We know that HIV can hide for long periods of time in the cells of your body and that it attacks a key part of your immune system – your T-cells or CD4 cells. Your body has to have these cells to fight infections and disease, but HIV invades them, uses them to make more copies of itself, and then destroys them.
Over time, HIV can destroy so many of your CD4 cells that your body can’t fight infections and diseases anymore. When that happens, HIV infection can lead to AIDS, the final stage of HIV infection.
However, not everyone who has HIV progresses to AIDS. With proper treatment, called “antiretroviral therapy” (ART), you can keep the level of HIV virus in your body low. ART is the use of HIV medicines to fight HIV infection. It involves taking a combination of HIV medicines every day. These HIV medicines can control the virus so that you can live a longer, healthier life and reduce the risk of transmitting HIV to others. Before the introduction of ART in the mid-1990s, people with HIV could progress to AIDS in just a few years. Today, a person who is diagnosed with HIV and treated before the disease is far advanced can have a nearly normal life expectancy.
No safe and effective cure for HIV currently exists, but scientists are working hard to find one, and remain hopeful.
WHAT IS AIDS?
“AIDS” stands for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. To understand what that means, let’s break it down:
- A – Acquired – AIDS is not something you inherit from your parents. You acquire AIDS after birth.
- I – Immuno – Your body’s immune system includes all the organs and cells that work to fight off infection or disease.
- D – Deficiency – You get AIDS when your immune system is “deficient,” or isn’t working the way it should.
- S – Syndrome – A syndrome is a collection of symptoms and signs of disease. AIDS is a syndrome, rather than a single disease, because it is a complex illness with a wide range of complications and symptoms.
As noted above, AIDS is the final stage of HIV infection, and not everyone who has HIV advances to this stage. People at this stage of HIV disease have badly damaged immune systems, which put them at risk for opportunistic infections.
Recent Comments