'Tin can miracle': Perry church builds mobile medical clinic
Rev. Bobby Gale was asked to build 10 OBGYN clinics for them to send to Ghana. He says the clinics help the indigenous, marginalized, and disenfranchised.
It can be easy to take our everyday access to health care for granted.
However, Unto the Least of His, a ministry in Savannah, is working to expand healthcare access in places that need it most, like a number of African countries.
So far, the ministry has formed 10 mobile OBGYN clinics. They've been working on the last one since the summer that they'll soon send to Ghana.
“If each organization can do just a little bit, I think it'll make the world just a better place,” says Unto the Last of His’ Reverend Bobby Gale said.
Gale has been building wells and providing access to clean water to folks in Africa for the past 20 years, but he says some people need more than that.
"One of the ladies of the tribe was going to get water. She was nine months pregnant. All of a sudden she gave birth on the side of the river, and she had to walk a mile and half back to her house,” he said. “Because of having no proper medical care, she died that night.”
As the pandemic started, the Yonkafa clinic, a project working to build medical health centers in Ghana asked Gale to build 10 OBGYN clinics for them.
“We partner with churches, and churches build these miracles of love, and then it will go to Atlanta and we'll load the container full of pharmaceuticals,” Gale said.
Buddy Roper, with the Perry United Methodist Church, thought they could take on the challenge of building the 10th and final “tin can miracle."
"We were looking for something that we could do for the community as well as the world and it's to save lives,” he says.
Roper says it's taken six months and $65,000 worth of fundraised money to transform this 40-foot cargo container into a solar powered OBGYN clinic.
“I've got splinters in my fingers right now as we talk. We've all put a lot of work in, a lot of painting. You know, that final stroke with a brush."
Gale explains that the clinics help the indigenous, marginalized, and disenfranchised.
"We feel happy that we're able to do it, but we feel sad that we have to do it because these are beautiful people. If you could meet them and just shake their hand and hug them, you’d love them. They’re just like you and me. They just lack the material resources to be able to have the things and you and I would just take for granted,” Gale said.
Roper says people from the church are sending their love with the box, and it means a lot to them.
"I think they're going to get the same feeling that we've got out of it too, about how much it means to this church, how much it means to the community. When you walk in there, it gives you chill bumps to think that they'll be a life saved in that,” he says.
Reverend Bobby Gale says he was asked to create 10 of these clinics to be shipped off, but he says there's an 11th one already being worked on.
He says they'll keep making them till they can't anymore.