Mercy Ships Kathy Lusco

August 23, 2007
Kathy Lusco and Corinne Roberts
  

Kathy Lusco pauses for a moment in the recovery room of the Mercy Ship  Anastasis. Lusco served on the hospital ship for seven months as a registered nurse.

Last June Kathy Lusco put her things in storage and flew to Ghana. She left home and family to serve for seven months in a medical mission where she knew no one and was unsure exactly what was ahead of her.

Kathy served as an RN aboard the Mercy Ship Anastasis. The Anastasis had been an Italian luxury liner retrofitted as a hospital ship, and actually functioned as a floating community. Not only did it contain three operating rooms, a recovery room, and other spaces in which to deliver medical services, it was a home away from home for its staff and personnel and sometimes their families. More than just places to eat and sleep, the facilities included a library, post office, bank, and school. Children as young as 18 months up to and including folks in their seventies lived and worked and went to school aboard the Anastasis.

Kathy first heard about Mercy Ships during a difficult time in her life, and while attending a “Medical Missions in Developing Countries” seminar she was impressed with the organization and its dedication to serving and presenting the Gospel to the poor. To be certain that this desire was not her idea (and not just a way to escape), she waited two years before applying for a position on the Anastasis. “God placed it in my heart and it just stayed there,” she says.

She was fearful, though, but not of the work before her. Kathy was a new Christian, and says, “I wondered if I was spiritually ready to do something like that.” What helped her was remembering that “Jesus asks us to offer ourselves to him to use how ever he will and then gives us the strength through the Holy Spirit.”

Once on board the Anastasis, Kathy found her job assignments rewarding, but sometimes exhausting. Work days were initially as long as 14 hours. That was tough. She rotated through different jobs, with the longest stint (3.5 months) in the recovery room. Weekends were sometimes opportunities for recreation, but more often were times to rest and be restored. Kathy found she “learned to rely on Jesus more than I ever had before.”

The reward was the gift of relationships, of “working together with one heart and purpose” (Phil 2:2). Kathy felt the joy of community in being “a little part of doing a big thing.” Her faith grew as she worked, serving God with friends and co-workers. “I met and worshipped with believers from all over the world.” She reflected on her previously limited view of being a Christian, and marveled: “There are people everywhere who love the Lord just like we do!”

Relationships and worship were part of interacting with patients, as well. Especially touching for Kathy was a patient with a fistula. Women with these fistulas suffer tremendously. The fistula results from childbirth trauma, and the babies generally don’t survive. Because of the continuous leakage of urine, and the accompanying odor, the women are ostracized from the community, and their husbands leave them. They are utterly alone. But as this patient, who had suffered for 20 years, was wheeled from surgery to the recovery room, she was overcome with joy. Kathy recalled that she smiled beautifully and “had her hands up in the air…praising God. She was going to have a new life.”

Kathy has a new perspective about what is truly important, a perspective gained through her experiences on the Anastasis. Anyone can serve, she says. You don’t have to be a health care worker. If you can teach, sew, clean, cook, do clerical work, or support crew members with prayer or finances, you are needed. “If God puts it in your heart to do it, listen,” she says.

Through it all, Kathy felt little homesickness, but there was one thing she yearned for. “I craved a nice cool breeze coming through the window.” Shouldn’t we all. Come, Holy Spirit.

For more information on Mercy Ships, log on to www.mercyships.org.