Cambria Heights minister goes back to Ghana to help

BY VICTOR G. MIMONI
Ken Tedeku, a Cambria Heights minister who was born in Ghana, returned recently to his native country for a 12-day mission.
Both he and Jon Yunis, a hernia specialist, were on a medical mercy mission to perform hernia repair on patients whose cases were too difficult for anyone in the country to perform.
The pair not only traveled together, but also shared a room in the rustic bare-bones hotels they stayed at in Accra, the capital and in the interior, a small town in the Afram Plains, Donkorkrom. It required eight-hour unairconditioned bus rides over rough, bumpy dirt roads and ferry-ride crossings of the Volta River to reach the outlying towns. But the pictures tell the story of how much the 20-member group was appreciated.
The team was made up of ministers, pastors, church personnel, doctors, including Yunis a surgeon, gynecologists, an infectious disease specialist and several students preparing for medical school.
It was a hot, unairconditioned third-world nation that he found in Ghana.
His experience in Africa, he admits, was so powerful and challenging that he wants to return.
I was able to perform hernia operations that were beyond the abilities of the doctors there. They had pre-planned who I would operate on and in one day I was able to operate on eight people, but we saw 1,800 people. Although the facilities were primitive, I was impressed with the passion and caring of the medical staff at each of the areas where we saw patients,  he explained as he showed the hundreds of pictures he had taken.