Disability & Special Needs Ministry
May 2021
All are gifted, needed, and treasured!
“Welcome to the Twenty-Third (23rd) edition of the Gulf States Conference (GSC) “Disability, Special Needs, & Possibilities Ministry Newsletter”. The format of remaining issues will focus not only on “secular” disability matters but also on an endeavor to provide “Spiritual” input to endure these turbulent times.
Because the COVID-19 virus continues to rage, we will cover a variety of subjects on coping with the stress and strain of quarantine mandates. If there is a specific topic you’d like to see addressed, please contact our office at your convenience.
This issue will include some of my favorite and encouraging Bible passages in the New International Version (NIV). I pray some will benefit you as well.
1 Timothy 6:20-21
Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, 21 which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith. Grace be with you all.
Romans 15:13
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
LEAVING HOME, AND RETURNING TO IT.
Welcome. When the world opens up more, will we have less time? I was chatting with some of my colleagues about this last week, how the absence of a commute has led, some days, to a more spacious schedule, one with time to fold laundry between meetings, to walk the dog at lunch. Brian Hogan, a barber in suburban Des Moines, built a video store in his basement.
We have the same amount of time, but, gradually, more experiences with which to fill it. Mask mandates eased slightly, an afternoon stroll becomes an adventure. I lingered, a few days ago, snapping photos from every angle of a preposterous red tulip with petals larger than my palm. Why had I never noticed the distinct, nearly psychedelic shades of pink advertised by the cherry, dogwood, and magnolia trees on my block? Ezra Marcus investigated the seeming proliferation of breathtaking blooms this year. “Have the tulips changed, or have we?” he asked.
The bears and berries are emerging in Sweden, it’s wildflower season in the Eastern United States. Even our homes are telling us it’s time to get out there, however “out there” we feel comfortable getting. Our expeditions away from home may exhilarate and exhaust us. We travel farther from home only to return, where we’ll try Melissa Clark’s recipes for fruit and vegetable tarts that use store-bought puff pastry, play video games that allow us to “redo any bad day with the click of a button.” We’re out and about in the world more and more, but still most at home.
Taking a student’s temperature during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Lagos, Nigeria.
Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
HUMANITY’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT
On a Sunday in July 2014, a man boarded a plane in Monrovia, Liberia, and flew to Lagos, Nigeria. He felt sick with a fever when the trip began and was in worse shape by the time he landed. The Nigerian authorities took him to a hospital, where doctors eventually diagnosed Ebola.
From that first patient, infections soon began to spread in Lagos, which is Africa’s most densely populated city. It was the most terrifying period during any Ebola outbreak, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said.
But two months later, the crisis was over. Nigeria had no more Ebola cases, and fewer than 10 people, including the man from Liberia, had died. How did Nigeria prevent an epidemic? It wasn’t science, or at least not science as people typically define it. It was more basic than that.
A Covid preview
Nigeria succeeded through a combination of good governance and organizational competence. Officials conducted roughly 18,500 in-person interviews with people potentially exposed to the Ebola virus and then moved those who seemed to be at risk into isolation wards. They were released if they tested negative and moved to a different isolation ward if they tested positive.
More recently, these same kinds of logistics have helped some countries fare better against Covid-19 than others. Canada has suffered only 37 percent as many deaths per capita as the U.S., thanks partly to tighter travel restrictions. Vietnam and some other Asian countries benefited from intense early contact tracing. Britain and Israel are now doing better than continental Europe not because of laboratory discoveries but because of more effective vaccine distribution.
The pattern extends far beyond infectious diseases like Covid and Ebola. The greatest human accomplishment of the last century is the near doubling of life spans, as Steven Johnson argues in the cover story in this weekend’s Times Magazine. Johnson refers to it as “Our Extra Life.” It is all the more remarkable when you consider that average longevity barely budged — around 35 years — for most of recorded history, into the 18th century.
Since then, science has played a crucial role in progress, including the development of antibiotics, vaccines and drugs to treat cancer and heart disease. Yet scientific discoveries often take decades to affect most people’s lives. And basic health measures, like hand washing, are sometimes even more important. Johnson writes:
Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root.
A 92-year-old woman in London participating in a dance movement psychotherapy session. Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
POLITICS AS A LIFESAVER
I wanted to highlight Johnson’s essay, because I think it sheds light on many of the world’s biggest challenges today, like Covid and climate change. On their face, they might seem to be technical problems. In truth, they are more political than technical.
Scientists have already invented amazing Covid vaccines; the question is how quickly the world can produce and dispense them? Scientists have also developed technologies that produce energy with relatively little pollution. Yes, further technical progress is important, but the bigger question is when political leaders and voters will decide to prioritize the fight against climate change.
A similar dynamic also applies to many big economic questions. There isn’t a big mystery about how to reduce inequality and lift living standards for most Americans. Raising taxes on the wealthy, which are historically low, and devoting the money to everyone else would make a real difference. But that doesn’t mean it will happen.
Americans sometimes like to dismiss politics as a grubby business that is disconnected from the things that really matter — science, health and everyday life. And while politics certainly can be grubby, it also remains the most powerful mechanism for human progress.
Credits
New York Times (April 2021 Editions)
Published by
George Hamilton
Assistant Disability Ministry Director
Gulf States Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
H. 256-883-7751
C. 850-543-1398
Disabilities & Special Needs Ministry Goals
Email: gsc-disability@gscsda.org
Website: https://gscsda.org/disability-ministries
Location: 10633 Atlanta Highway, Montgomery, AL, USA
Phone: 3342727493