Teaching Endoscopy to Future Missionaries

We wanted to elaborate a little bit regarding the endoscopic equipment that Olympus has agreed to donate to our hospital in Shell. With the gift that they’ve sent, we’ll be able to view each procedure on a screen (video endoscopy), instead of looking through a little eyepiece on the instrument. If you’ve never been in the driver’s seat during a colonoscopy or EGD, this may not seem like a huge deal; in reality it is enormous! As you may recall, one of the primary goals of our hospital in Shell is to teach and mentor residents who will carry on the work as medical missionaries in other parts of Ecuador and around the world (two of the doctors from Shell are currently on a missions trip to a hospital in the Congo). Trying to teach endoscopic procedures while looking through an old eyepiece, while not impossible, is far from ideal. It would be like trying to whale watch through a high powered telescope while standing on a boat that’s being rocked around by the waves. You may be able to focus on a whale in the distance for a moment, but by the time you hand off the telescope to your friend who wants to see it too, everything has moved. So you can see how nice it will be to be able to point things out on the screen. We are really excited about the teaching/mentoring aspect of our work in Shell. Thank you so much to Olympus for joining with us in this ministry! Thank you again to all our financial supporters—your gifts are being used in part to bring the equipment into the country. Thanks be to the Lord who continues to bless in so many ways!

This is an example of a video endoscopy unit.