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Canvasback Missions

IMPACT

Jim Ayer

01 - A Smile is Worth a Thousand Words

I will spend $1 and in return I will get tangible financial benefit.

Intangible benefit, people, my people, the state senator, my people, will access and benefit the best ever health care services that I will call this ministry the best ever health care provider.

It feels like it's at least 100 degrees out today.

I know it's 100% humidity, and in this tank, it's even hotter.

Japanese tanks, there's probably 10 of them in a row here, they took over the island of Pohnpei.

They were in control for many years during the war, before the war and during the war.

And General Douglas MacArthur, they had a plan.

They were going to try and recapture the islands.

What they did is they called island hopping.

They'd bomb and they'd take over 1 island, then they'd skip the next island, go on to the next 1, then they'd skip the next island and so on.

The Japanese here, they ended up, the blockades were so severe, they finally had no ammunition to shoot at planes anymore, they had no food.

They went into the towns and the villages and they created havoc with the people.

Tell me about your family was here on the islands at that time.

What was it like to have the Japanese here taking over your home and everything else?

The Japanese, you know, they made the people really work.

If you don't work, they really punish you.

And you make a mistake, they really punish you.

And punish in this case means what, maybe?

A group works in a company and something is stolen in the company, If there are 15 or 20 of them, all of them are beaten.

If nobody confess, they beat them until 1 of them will confess.

And I heard from my father that 1 time, the place where he was working, there were like 7 or 8 of them, and something was stolen there.

So what they did, they tied their legs up, their heads down, and this Japanese soldier start kicking them and beating them with his gun and all those kind of things.

He cursed the rest of the people, saying, why you people are scared?

So he confessed that he was the 1 who did it.

I mean, we look at all these tanks and think of all the stuff that went on here.

Anything else you can think of from the family that went on during this time?

Because the Americans, they don't land here.

And my mother and my father, they used to tell me that there are some caves when there is a, the Japanese will know that planes are coming.

And the Americans will come in and just bomb everything.

You know, there are some islands here where they have guns, maybe even here.

If you go to Soquez, you will see the marks of all these bombs.

You know, my mother told us that he was putting that troop on his house, and this plane came in and just start shooting.

And probably thought this was a Japanese, that they shot that guy.

She said that the intestines were hanging.

But after the war, when the Americans came in, they asked all the locals, those people who were hurt during the Japanese time, and they gave lots of money to those people who were hurt.

If they destroy your properties, your house, and things like that, there was money.

I think they got it from the United Nations that helped the local people.

During the time of the war, how many Japanese, do you know how many Japanese were here on the island?

I'm not sure how many on Pohnpei, but there were more Japanese than the locals here.

Because when they came in, they did not come to go back.

They were planning to make these islands part of Japan.

So the population of the Japanese here were double.

The people on the, you know, like Marshall, Bonpei, Chuuk, Guam, and all those islands, there were the number of them.

And Bonapenne, the highest job they can get is secretary.

But in fourth grade what they learn is carpentry.

Well this is an arduous climb up to the top of this mountain, but it's going to be worth it.

Wait till you see what we find at the top.

When the Japanese occupied the island, especially up here on the top of this mountain where they placed many guns.

The jungle grows so rapidly, they chop things down every year for people to be able to see this.

It's 1 of the gun emplacements of the Japanese Army.

Able to reach clear out on the harbor and beyond.

02 - The Amazing Volunteer

♪ ♪ We are in such a beautiful, idyllic location in Micronesia on a beach.

You know there are people who cannot see what I'm seeing right now.

There are people who can't see the colors or anything else.

Stay tuned today to find out how CanvasBack is changing all of that.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ You know, I kind of like to call this section the anatomy of a volunteer.

See because Canvas Back mission, that's what makes the whole program work is volunteers.

People come from all over the country, all over the world sometimes, to join with Camus Pack to help people in need.

Especially, in this case, they focused on the islands, Micronesia.

In Pompeii, the People can make $30, $50 a month.

Why do these people leave lucrative practices?

Why do they leave good paying jobs at home?

Why do they leave family and friends, take all their vacation time and come here?

And I think what you're gonna find is they all have a love to do something for somebody else.

And in so doing, they gain so much to themselves.

They gain an incredible blessing themselves.

It's ready to see what these volunteers are doing in an amazing way.

Music Yeah, so we are in Pohnpei, however you like to pronounce it, Micronesia, and we are at the main hospital.

And 1 of the things that I always remember about my last trip to Majuro was finishing a long day of work and coming outside and seeing the kids and that just cheered me up and we would walk home every day and the kids started waiting for us because we had pockets full of toys.

We had chalk and they would graffiti the whole city with chalk.

Yeah I was watching you the other night you were going down the street and you had all these little fancy balls bouncing around.

But that's really fun because I like to interact.

It's nice to know who you're helping and that's important.

So I wanted to go outside also because if you haven't been here, you kind of wonder what the hospital looks like.

Some people wonder if it's made of, you know, wood or is it a shack?

It's just really dated and not really finished, but it's functional, you know.

So between like surgery and clinic, personally, maybe like 10 to 20.

And that's not very much compared to what we can do at home.

But every patient's brand new and every patient has 2 eyes and It seems like every eye has a problem.

And then you get them into the operating room, and that takes a few hours of your day, too.

Well, you're asking questions that I don't know the answer to, but I think we're in the 20s, 21 maybe.

So you're doing a lot of work on a daily basis as a team.

And sometimes 1 of the other doctors will see the patient and they have multiple problems.

So you'll get a retina specialist and you'll get an optometrist or you'll get a glaucoma or cataract doctor looking at them trying to help solve the problem.

Well give me a tutorial here, what are we putting on?

So we say don't forget to wear your hat to the party.

And what you'll notice too is a lot of us try to recycle as much as possible.

Although I thought it was done for the day.

So I take it somewhere along this line is we can't go in unless we've got this.

So you'll see a red line before you go into a hallway.

Now, this is not necessarily a sterile hallway, but it is a hallway that we call clean.

And then the sterile environment is when you go into an operating room where there is instruments opened up and so you have to wear a mask when you go into those places.

So for here we don't need a mask and then I think I heard you talking about you know scrubbing you know why do you kind of rub you bring your arm across the water so everything goes from you know sterile to clean to contaminated almost so this hands and so forth is the most sterile area down to your elbows, which are sterile, but after that it's not.

So all the dirt and everything washes towards the non-sterile arms.

That's why you put your hand through the water like that.

Why do you not touch the 2 hands together?

So we're just trying to get them dry as we go out.

Well you know the beauty here of this island is incredible.

Pohnpei is an island virtually out in the middle of nowhere.

The teams traveled about 2 days, 2 days to get here by airline.

It was kind of grueling travel, but they've done it of free will because you see they're all volunteers.

They've come here to this island, the doctors, the ophthalmology team, the dental team to help people.

Now while it's a beautiful island, the folks don't have a lot of money.

You see, it's a situation that while people may make $30 or $50 a month, they can't afford a surgery that costs thousands and thousands of dollars.

There are people that go for maybe, well, I don't know, 20 years.

20 years they've gone without surgery on an eye that they've needed for 20 years.

In the United States, I can't even begin to imagine how that happens, but it really does happen.

As we walk down the road here, look at this.

But think about how could someone here afford a $10, 000, $12, 000 surgery?

They just can't afford anything like that.

But because of Canvas Back missions, Canvas Back is able to provide all of this free of charge.

I want to share with you today some amazing volunteers.

Stories of volunteers that just a little warm your heart because people from every walk of life But they were touched by God to come out here on their own leave their practices leave their homes in some cases leave their families and travel out here to help these dear people.

03 - An Archaeological Wonder

I'm out here in this gorgeous beach, lots of sand, but I want to ask you a question.

Have you ever had a grain of sand or some dirt in your eye?

Man, that just is such an irritant, it drives you crazy.

But what about if you have a needle put in your eye?

Today's program may not be for the faint of heart, but it is a great program.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Little island here.

I mean, it's kind of amazing because they're all just coral.

Coral of every kind, shape, but the whole island's made out of that.

You know, it takes a very special people to live on places like this, because very little rainwater, a lot of ways it can be dangerous.

There's very little food, very little anything.

Now, if you just want to come for a weekend, maybe you can even rent a little place like this of your own and a little getaway.

But for the people here, it's a hard life.

That's why Canvas Back comes, is to help these people because it is such a hard life.

Matter of fact, our doctors that come, the free surgeries that are given, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of surgeries, absolutely free thanks to CanvasBack.

So, you know, if you'd like to participate and be a partner in Canvas Bag we'd invite you to do that because every dollar you spend is a mission dollar well spent.

It's stretched to the max to help these dear people.

So this is the very last part of Naya Madal.

How many years were they constructing all of this?

They say they came from east, came and defeated them.

All the first harvest, before you eat your first harvest of banana, you have to bring it to them.

No, everyone was really feeling bad about that.

Look at how intricate everything is placed.

Here we are with the team, the eye doctors doing this most intricate surgery on the human eye, yet many people say, oh, that just happened, the human eye just happened, but could we say this just happened?

You know, the ocean waves washed over here and all of a sudden all these rocks appeared?

You know, some of these rocks, as I said earlier, are 50 tons or more.

These came all the way from the other side of the island.

Everything was moved to this side of the island.

The same as they don't know how the pyramids were built, The same as they don't know how the larger stones of Machu Picchu were placed there.

The intricate design of fitting everything in.

Well today, especially when I went to school, you know, we're taught that just evolution, the more time you add, the more years you add onto something, just everything can happen.

And we're taught that humanity is a growing intelligence.

Evolution, we're evolving into a greater species.

However, there seems to be a problem because scientists today, with all of their knowledge, have no idea how a lot of this happened.

But let me throw something out at you here.

There's a fellow that wrote a book many years ago, Secrets of the Lost Races.

In there he coined a phrase, Upards, out-of-place artifacts.

A young man in England in the 1800s was shoveling coal into the furnace.

Out fell a big piece of coal, and inside was a beautifully hand-tooled silver necklace.

Inside the coal, we're taught that Earth is millions and millions of years old.

I would submit to you that according to the Bible story, creation from the hand of the Creator, We came with extreme intelligence from the Creator.

But after the fall, we've gotten less and less and less intelligent.

Hence, today, we can't figure out how a lot of this was done.

Decide for yourself after you study it, after you've found out what God's really all about.

You know, I look at all these massive stones.

I can't help but think of the name of Pompeii.

Well, we really don't know, but my guess is probably.

See, most religions that believe in some other god, little g god, tend to have sacrifices.

These people came, whoever they were, they came here, They took over the whole island.

They quelled every other rebellion, every other war, and controlled everything.

Now, it's been estimated that it may have taken 1, 000 people a day to construct this island for 300 years.

Because it's been estimated again that about 40, 000 people is what it would have been in this area, 40, 000 people.

You eat all the food in a matter of a few months.

04 - The Difference She is Making

I'm here with a lot of clams on 1 of the islands just on the way from Non-Midol.

It gets a teeny single grain of sand inside somehow.

It begins an irritation process and that clam excretes and forms a wrapping around that sand seed as it were and it grows and grows until it produces a gorgeous and beautiful pearl.

Today we're going to look at some irritation, and we're going to look at what happened in some beautiful pearls.

You know, when Jesus came to this earth, he came with a specific purpose of calling us back to himself.

We'd wandered far away, and his every act was designed to draw us closer.

Much of his time was spent in relieving suffering and pain.

He's called us to do the same, hence the mission of Canvas Back, to be the healing hands to a suffering world.

Tell me what you think of what Canvas Back is doing here at the hospital, the team that comes to help.

Because beyond 6 months, then they would not have patients.

Okay, but there's 6 months' worth of patients.

Yeah, I think so, because they need to go through the process of exam.

Some of them may not need, but there's a lot of them that need, but have not been able to come.

So Mara, do you understand any of the language now that you've been here?

I really need to work on it a little bit though.

I know 1 thing though, you understand the language of love and so do they.

Yeah there's I think a lot is expressed through body language.

When we don't have that communication, we can still just smile and make them feel comfortable without really understanding their language at all.

And Mari, you're here at the Canvas Bag Mission.

Volunteerism is an important role in what I do personally and as well as with our clinic.

So ophthalmic techs at our clinic, we work up patients.

We kind of triage what the needs might be, and then move forward and communicate it to the doctor.

How many years have you worked at your clinic?

So you got 5 years of experience and I assume you get a little vacation from your your clinic but I've also got a feeling you spend that vacation time here.

Why on earth do you spend vacation time volunteering doing more of the thing that you do at home?

There's just a, in our house there's a saying that hope anchors the soul and I think when we volunteer we provide hope to other people and doing that is really important.

So it's something that I got fulfillment from and I'm starting to pass it on to my kids.

My kids have been joining me on some of the events and it's really even better to see as a parent when your children become that same person and giving back and finding the joy out of doing so.

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Series

IMPACT

02 - The Amazing Volunteer

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

IMPACT

03 - An Archaeological Wonder

28m

IMPACT

04 - The Difference She is Making

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AMEN 2008 Breakout Seminars

Dentists on the Frontline in Ministry, Part 2

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Dental

Situational Grace: Applying Faith to Daily Practice

44m

ASI 2014 Plenary Sessions

ASI Members In Action

1h 57m

ASI 2013 Plenary Sessions

ASI Members in Action

1h 57m

Sound Doctrine