Medical equipment ready for delivery to Ghana

Ron Wingard (right), a Texas Baptist Men volunteer from Mimosa Lane Baptist Church in Mesquite, helps load a container bound for Ghana filled with medical supplies collected by Jim Howard (left), a physician from Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall. (Photo / Ken Camp)

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DALLAS—Texas Baptist Men volunteers rang in the New Year by loading a shipping container with medical supplies and equipment two healthcare professionals from Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall collected for Baptist Medical Centre in Ghana.

JimHoward 350Jim Howard, a physician from Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall, works at the Texas Baptist Men Missions Equipping Center in Dallas, loading medical supplies and equipment in a container for shipment to Ghana. (Photos by Ken Camp)For more than a decade, physician Jim Howard and surgical assistant Lyle Duyck, both laymen at Lake Pointe Church, have collected donated medical equipment and supplies from Dallas-area hospitals for healthcare ministries in developing nations. 

The pair have focused on opened-but-unused supplies that otherwise would have been discarded after surgeries were cancelled, as well as serviceable equipment hospitals wanted to replace.

Forklift 350Texas Baptist Men volunteers load a container with medical equipment and supplies for a Baptist hospital in Ghana.The container volunteers filled at the Texas Baptist Men Dixon Missions Equipping Center in Dallas was scheduled for shipment Jan. 6 to Ghana. 

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board—now International Mission Board—founded the Baptist Medical Centre in Nalegiru, Ghana, in 1958, working in partnership with Ghana’s Gold Coast Baptist Conference. 

RonWingateJimHoward 300Ron Wingard (left) from Mesquite helps physician Jim Howard (right) of Rockwall prepare medical supplies for shipment to Ghana.The IMB transferred the hospital to the Ghana Baptist Convention two years ago. The 123-bed hospital serves about 10,000 inpatients and 60,000 outpatients a year.

Howard has journeyed to Ghana more than 20 times in the last 12 years. He plans to return in February to work with field clinics as part of a Lake Pointe mission team and to serve an additional two weeks at the Baptist Medical Centre. 

A second container of medical supplies Howard and Duyck collected will be shipped to a Christian worker in Iraqi Kurdistan who has a long-term relationship with TBM.

The worker—whose name and precise location are withheld for security reasons—works in cooperation with the Kurdistan Regional Government to aid refugees, internally displaced people and others in need. 


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TBM President Gary Smith, a member of Brookhaven Church in McKinney, noted the exact date for shipping the container to Kurdistan still is being negotiated, but it likely will be loaded and ready in mid-February.


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