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By Dorothy Brotherton
THE MISSION field can be perilous.
What if you succumb to heat exhaustion or hypothermia,
or suffer a head injury in a remote location? What do you do if you are
attacked by a wild animal, or struck by lightning?
These emergencies, and more, are the subject of a
course on wilderness survival taught by JoAnne Boonstra in Romania.
The Kelowna-based retired nurse teaches English-speaking students
from many parts of the world, who will be going to some of the remotest
corners of the globe.
“Often they are away from help for days or more
at a time. They need to know how to help themselves and how to help each
other,” she told BCCN.
“Did you know,” she asked brightly,
“that you can ease the pain of snow blindness with tea? And tea bags
are something they carry in their packs.” Her course is laced with
these kinds of simple solutions.
Boonstra’s mission is to help equip students to
survive in places such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, the
Amazon forests of South America, Pygmy villages of the Congo, Inuit
settlements in Greenland and northern Canada, the jungle villages of Papua
New Guinea, and the island of Vanuatu.
The students’ mission is to take the gospel to
these hard-to-reach places, after six months of Bible training at Remote
Tribe Training Centre in Romania – which is a project of the Pilgrim
Relief Society.
Just over a year ago, Boonstra thought she was retired.
She had nursed in northern Canada, where there were often no doctors. She
was filling days with volunteering in her home community at a hospice and a
children’s grief camp; she was also taking kindergarten children on
hospital tours.
A phone call from Sebastian Titiru changed her life.
After working with bushmen in Namibia, he founded the Pilgrim Relief
Society in 2001 – aiming to improve life for indigenous people in
remote areas, and to bring them the gospel.
The society launched the Remote Tribe Training Center.
Dedicated in 2007, it partners with It Is Written ministry, an arm of the
Seventh-day Adventist church, to sponsor the school.
Shortly after the school opened, Titiru saw the need
for wilderness survival training; accordingly, he called Boonstra. She felt
unqualified, and said no; but he asked her to pray about it. Her
husband and children urged her to reconsider.
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After saying yes, she learned there was no course
curriculum, and she would be responsible for designing it.
“I felt God was asking me to step out of my
comfort zone,” said Boonstra.
She imagined all the things that could go wrong for a
person in a remote location with no access to medical care; then she set
about compiling simple solutions. She got help from friends, drug
companies, Kelowna General Hospital and medical supply outlets.
Then she talked her husband, Stan, into coming with
her. “He knows that I don’t like change, and am scared silly of
people I do not know,” she confessed. As it turned out, Stan helped
in more ways than simply bolstering her confidence. He led worship at the
school, and preached in nearby churches. He became the live demonstration
figure for various procedures, such as CPR.
In the classroom, four hours a day for two weeks,
Boonstra taught responses to everything from electrocution to lightning
strikes; gunshot wounds to animal bites and stings; injuries of the head,
face, spine and chest to snow blindness and foreign objects in the eye;
from choking to rescue breathing.
She compiled printouts with a checklist of symptoms and
treatments, and had them laminated so students could carry them in their
packs along with first-aid supplies.
After her initial reluctance, Boonstra now says,
“I’d go back in a minute.”
She’ll do just that in April, to teach a second
round. For her, it has become a project that speaks to her basic philosophy
of living.
“This is a reason for existence: to be there for
one another.”
February 2009
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