Life Changing Care for Disabled Filipino Children

Greeting from the Visayas, Philippines.

After two years of lockouts we are able to travel again.  In an attempt to restart our ministry we have been traveling and meeting with our partners in ministry so we can adapt and develop our process and proceedures to help  disabled children again.

We began our meetings with our oldest partner, Little Children of the Philippines in Daro, Dumaguete.  Carmenia and Benjo are most excited to work with us again and have several new candidates for surgery.  We were able to donate several items to them to use in their physical therapy center.  We also discussed their commitment to help us establish a casting clinic for clubfoot children on their premises.  They were enthusiastic supporters of the idea, depending on what our partners propose.

We took a week long trip to Davao and Cebu to meet with medical providers.  Our first stop was the Tebow CURE Hospital in Davao.  Since our last visit there, things have changed quite a bit.  They have a new director who we met previously at another ministry in Davao, and several staffing and proceedures changes due to COVID.  In our meetings there it became apparent that we needed to adjust our previous proceedures for getting patients approved and admitted.  This will also add significant cost for each patient and family member for testing and housing.  We are working our way through those issues.

Our next stop was Jubilee Foundation in Davao City!  Jubilee is a provider of orthotic and prosthetic devices, they make all of their devices on site and provide fitting and training of patients on the use of their device.  We have one patient awaiting a new leg, and a couple of children in need of modification of their current devices.  We plan on sending our first patient to Jubilee in the near future.

We then continued on to Cebu City to meet with the orthopedic surgery team at Vincentte Sotto hospital.  This team has an accreditation from Miracle Feet, a U.S. NGO whose program provides casting, orthotics, and funding to treat very young children with clubfoot disorder.  Our talks went very well and we are most excited to be able to send patients to them as we can avoid air travel to Cebu all together.  We are also exploring the opportunity with them to establish a Miracle Feet program in Dumaguete.

Of course, our other activities such as children's feedings and clothing distribution is still ongoing.  Thank you to all of our donors and supporters who make our ministry possible.

Greetings from Siquijor Island, Philippines!

Happy New Year to all our donors and supporters. We at Cast Your Nets Ministry are looking forward to 2022 and getting our ministry back to work with our original purpose. It was a rewarding and frustrating end of 2021. The good news is we had an extremely successful Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign and we picked up a number of unexpected donations throughout the Christmas giving season. Thanks go to our loyal donors and the efforts of our partner GlobalGiving!

The frustrations came from circumstances that were out of our control. The local government imposed a strict COVID lockdown from late September to mid-November and this cancelled most of our efforts at local ministry.  Then on December 16^th Siquijor Island and the Visayas region suffered a direct hit from Super Typhoon Odette. Locally we only suffered minimal damage but other areas around us were devastated. We did go without electricity and internet for about a week, while other areas are still waiting for services to return. In association with other local expats, we have responded to this tragedy by setting up another project on GlobalGiving to raise money for typhoon victims on the island of Olongo. We partnered with a couple of locals from the area who are directing the relief and you can check out that project on our GlobalGiving page (Project #55200). We were able to provide shirts and other clothing from the John Cooper School to the children and adults of Olongo Island, see pictures attached!

We are hoping to make a trip to Tebow Cure Hospital in Davao later this month to coordinate our plans and expectations to bring children for surgery beginning the second quarter of this year. We are also looking at various prosthetic providers to fit Charlie with a new foot, as we assisted him in his amputation in 2019. We are also working with Little Children of the Philippines Handclasp center as a physical therapy provider, and to identify children in need of surgery in Davao.

Again, thank you to all our loyal supporters for helping us in our mission!