Thursday, January 21, 2010

Nursing career leads to mission work in Mexico for 1975 Perry-Lecompton graduate

by Carolyn Kaberline

Jolynne Myers of Perry planned on a career in nursing while she was a student at Perry-Lecompton High School. However, she had no idea at the time that she would be practicing in Tlaxiaco, Mexico.

A 1975 graduate of Perry-Lecompton High School, Myers attended the University of Kansas majoring in pre-nursing. Following two years there, she attended St. Luke’s School of Nursing and became an ICU nurse for seven years.

In 1982 Myers received her bachelor’s degree from Webster College in St. Louis and became a nursing educator in 1989. A graduate degree from KU in exercise physiology and health education soon followed, and Myers worked mainly in the education field until 1996 when she received her master’s degree in nursing from the University of Missouri in Kansas City. She worked as a nurse practitioner in primary care in the Kansas City area until August of 2009 when she left to work as a missionary in Mexico.

“I had been doing short term missions for non-denominational churches,” Myers said, adding that she’d been to Nigeria twice and China once. However, she slowly felt that God was calling her to the mission field for the long term, and so she began looking for missionary training.

“I found Global Frontier Missions,” Myers said. “I got into it and couldn’t get away from it. I e-mailed them but didn’t get a return, but about six weeks later when I was attending a conference, things started to happen.”

Myers said when she attended a third seminar at the conference hoping to “get some illumination,” a lady asked if she could come and sit with her. Myers had felt she was being called to the missions in Latin America, and by the end of the conference she had received an application to join the group.

“The application was eight pages long,” Myers recalled, adding that from the time she heard back from them to the time of her departure she had “seven and a half months to sell everything.”

Myers soon found herself in Tlaxiaco, a town of about 20,000, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, arriving in late August of last year. She was no sooner there than she began working in the nearby clinic and attending school.

“My ministry so far has felt a little ‘scattered,’ ” Myers wrote in one of her letters to friends back home. “School is going fine, but between reading all the material, going to class, practicing Spanish . . . the ministry part for me hasn’t really gotten to where I was hoping it would be yet. They [other missionaries there] keep assuring me that building relationships and language learning is ministry.” Building relationships so far has meant “the guys play basketball and soccer” with the youngsters, picking corn, teaching English, having piñata parties for the kids, digging wells for clean water, and giving cooking classes, as well as providing medical care.

“Diabetes is a huge problem here,” Myers said, noting that sugar is in everything “except their desserts. Desserts are not really sweet at all. The ice cream also isn’t sweet, but sugar seems to go into everything else. If you ask for coffee without sugar, it still has sugar in it, just less than you normally get.”

Myers also told of a “wonderful sandwich” of shredded chicken with cabbage she’d had with “a ton of honey along with the barbecue sauce. Added to that potatoes or beans and rice are served at the same time along with tortillas and it is a carb nightmare for the diabetic.”

In addition to diabetes, another big problem is that while many people need medical care for a variety of ailments, if the treatment takes more than one visit, they will probably not return. Myers also said that many people there need reading glasses by the time they are 26 or 27 due to reading by kerosene lamps. While Myers said that building relationships has been a big part of the job so far, the subject of religion is broached whenever there is an opportunity.

“Currently they have a fear-based religion,” she explained. “They exist on about $23 a month, and while they are very poor, they will still throw huge festivals to appease a saint whose name has really been substituted for a local deity. They believe that something bad will happen if they don’t throw the festivals: Their crops will fail or one of their kids will die.”

Although Myers said that while she first missed a lot of the conveniences of home, she has actually come to like not having television or radio.

“I listen to music on my computer once in a while but not often,” she said, adding that when they were without gas—used for heating water and cooking—for a week and electricity for 24 hours when their transformer blew, she found that it wasn’t that big of a problem.

“It’s amazing how you can get by. I have a great flashlight; I read by my clip-on book light; we ate a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches and crackers, the computer had a battery so I could still write or play a few games now and again. Mainly it was just fun watching how creative the young people were. They never complained about the lack of ‘amenities’ and made their own fun,” she said.

While Myers returned to Perry for the Christmas holidays, she looked back over the past year or so and her call to the missions, “it’s so funny now. I cried for six months. I didn’t want to go, but now I love it. It’s home.”