Above: Light spills from the doorway and stained glass windows of Central United Methodist Church of Quéssua, part of the Quéssua Mission in east Angola. Established in the late 1800s by Methodist missionaries and destroyed by almost three decades of civil war that ended in 2002, the mission is being rebuilt, bringing education, health care and food security to people in a rural valley near the provincial capital of Malanje.

QUÉSSUA, Angola (UM News) — Since the late 19th century, the Methodist mission station in Quéssua, Angola, has supported the physical and spiritual needs of the villagers in this rural area, now part of the East Angola Conference of The United Methodist Church.

A mission station is an outpost of the church that provides for the physical and spiritual needs of a community. It uses a holistic approach that supports education, skills training, health care, and agricultural and economic sustainability.

Having adopted more modern approaches to mission work, the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries no longer utilizes the mission-station model, though there is still a handful operating on the African continent.

Since 2004, the Florida Conference has maintained a relationship with the East Angola Conference and supported missionaries at the Quéssua station. The Florida Conference also has sent mission teams there on a regular basis.

In April, a Volunteers in Mission team from Florida traveled to Quéssua for a variety of projects, ranging from medical to nutritional to infrastructure. United Methodist News accompanied the team.

One of the main projects was providing cataract surgeries and other vision care.

Russ Montgomery, who runs a nonprofit in Tampa called Living in Faith, worked with the Florida Conference to arrange for a surgeon and medical equipment to go to Angola. His ministry runs an eye clinic in Haiti, and he made his first trip to Quéssua in 2022.

Malnutrition and overexposure to intense sunlight are major contributors to cataracts, which develop over time and can leave an individual nearly blind. Montgomery likens the effect of the sun on the eye to putting an egg in a frying pan. “It’s clear at first but then turns opaque in the heat,” he said.

The medical team, led by California-based ophthalmologist and eye surgeon Dr. Jeehee Kim, performed 26 cataract surgeries, removing damaged lenses and replacing them with artificial ones.

Graciela Espinosa, an optometrist serving as a missionary from the Methodist Church of Cuba, assisted with the pre- and post-operation exams as well as translating for the Portuguese-speaking patients.

“It’s really moving to help people who have been basically blind for years,” she said. “They say, ‘I can see the light; I can read the hour on the clock,’ and they start giving thanks to God.”

Espinosa and her husband, Dr. Serguey Espinosa, a dentist, are supported as missionaries by the Florida Conference. She works at the mission station’s hospital, providing eye exams for children in the villages and obtaining glasses for them through the conference, as well as medicine for eye infections.

“Many of the children cannot see well and because of that, they leave school. They can also lose vision if an eye infection goes untreated,” she said.

Consistent electricity is vital while operations are going on, and the hospital lacked reliable backup. Its generator hadn’t worked properly in three years. Two members of the team, Ed Lobnitz, an electrical engineer, and David Johnston, an electrical contractor, were able to rewire the connections at the clinic and get the generator running again.

“The power goes out quite often here, and when you’re operating on an eye, a minute without power is trouble,” Lobnitz said.

Ruthie Schaad, a nurse and long-term mission volunteer, has developed a relationship with the people of the surrounding villages and can describe the hardship that loss of vision creates for them. She has lived in Quéssua since 2016 along with her husband, David, who was born to missionary parents and lived at the mission until the mid-1960s. He now helps maintain the farm equipment and the water system that supplies the entire mission.

“Many are subsistence farmers and their existence depends on being able to garden,” she said. “One couple who both had cataracts were brought here by their son, who is half-blind from childhood measles. They come from a village across the river, and their eyesight is too poor to safely cross the one bridge to get here.”

In helping with the patients after their bandages were removed, Schaad was able to tell them, “Cada dia, vai ser melhor,” or “Each day, it’s going to be better.”

She said, “One patient is so happy because now he can take care of his fruit trees. Another man from the village said he has thrown away his cane and is able to see the chapel for the first time.”

Ben Jacob, an assistant research professor in the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida in Tampa, joined the team to implement a unique anti-malaria program that he calls “Seek and Destroy” — named after a song by Metallica.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, human malaria is transmitted only by female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. Adult females lay eggs directly on water — 50-200 at a time — and they hatch within just a few days. With its long rainy season, Angola is prone to pools of standing water that are ideal environments for egg-laying.

“When you see the lines of people waiting outside the medical clinic here, I’d say that about 80% of those cases are malaria,” Jacob said.

Jacob said it’s been a common practice to treat these habitats with chemicals, but the insects develop genetic resistance. His method aims to kill the larval mosquitoes before they hatch by simply filling in areas of standing water with dirt and leveling them off to prevent future pooling.

Each habitat is given a GPS coordinate and mapped on Google Earth. Those coordinates are used to program a drone, which will fly low over each targeted area and treat with a safer insecticide.

“There’s no environmental contamination and no problem with genetic resistance, and you’re killing thousands of mosquitoes,” he said. “Once they come out, there’s nothing you can do but put up a net, and you can’t walk around with a net 24/7.”

Jacob said it’s crucial to get buy-in from the villagers, since they will have to be trained to keep maintaining the habitats and how to program the GPS coordinates. The main expense is providing wheelbarrows and shovels to leave with each village, so the initiative is sustainable.

He said encouraging participation from the villagers wasn’t difficult, since they understood both the health and economic burdens of malaria.

“If you only make $50 a month, you can’t spend $20 on medicine, plus the time it takes you to travel to get treated and the lost work that entails,” he said.

Jacob was recruited to the team by Montgomery, who also lives in Tampa.

“Russ saw an interview I did on TV, came and knocked on my door, and said, ‘We have this issue going on in Angola.’ I’d been doing it in other African countries so I said ‘Sure,’” Jacob said.

While in Quéssua, Jacob said he and his team located and destroyed over 500 habitats of various sizes. In September, he will return with a drone pilot to treat the habitats with insecticide.

He acknowledged that it’s a daunting task to essentially fight malaria with a shovel.

“It’s a big killer I’m fighting,” he said, “but David beat Goliath, didn’t he?”

While Jacob was teaching villagers to fight malaria, Jennifer and Victor Martin were teaching women in the village a different set of fighting skills.

Sexual assaults and rapes are prevalent in the area, with women working in the fields or walking alone at night being especially vulnerable. Some have even been killed. The Martins, both with military backgrounds, led classes in self-defense to give women skills to fight off would-be attackers.

“Many attacks come from behind while they’re out working in the field, so they need to know what to do and get turned around so they can do some of these things,” Jennifer Martin said.

Several hundred women attended the series of trainings. One participant, Terese Canda Vungi, said, “What we learned will be great help for all the women in the villages.”

Paulina Maria Anton, who attended the training in the nearby village of Manga, said, “I’m happy for the training and understand that I will not fight, but I will defend myself. Now I know the techniques of defense and I will practice at home.”

Martin said one group was so thankful for the class that they gave the instructors a couple of chickens as a gift.

Malnutrition is another issue in this part of Angola, for people of all ages. One idea the Florida Conference had was to create protein-rich nutritional bars containing peanut butter and a vitamin mix.

“When you’re so malnourished, regular food isn’t enough,” said Michele Johnston, a member of the team from Jacksonville.

The mission station has a 20-hectare (about 50 acres) farm on its grounds, and it runs an agricultural program overseen by Kutela Katembo, a Global Ministries missionary and agriculturalist supported by both the Florida and Mountain Sky conferences. The farm grows peanuts and provided over 100 bags for the project.

In addition to the nutritional supplement project, the team volunteered as servers at the mission station’s weekly children’s food program. Each Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of children and teens in the village are provided a healthy meal — for many, it may be the only one they get that day.

“Quéssua is surrounded by villages with people who can’t afford to eat three times a day,” Katembo said. “Whenever we have something from the farm, we use it to support the kids.”

Team member Ivellise Arman said, “It’s been a wonderful experience getting to meet all the kids. Serving all their meals and providing for them has been really overwhelming for me.”

Arman was one of several for whom this was a first trip to Angola. Sandi Goodman, however, has visited 13 times since 2010.

“The young adults we work with today were the children we came to see in the very beginning,” she said. “I’ve spent more time with people in Angola over these years than I have people at home.”

Goodman, whose father was a Methodist pastor in Florida, said she made a pledge at the age of 12 to become a missionary in Africa. Her three sons have been involved in missions, and Goodman said now all of their teenage children want to come.

“I couldn’t have dreamed of this. I still feel like that little girl at church camp vowing to do something,” she said.

Though few of them knew one another before, team members have been pleased how they came together and how each of them plays a different part in the mission.

“What’s cool about this team is we’re a consortium,” Jacob said. “Every one of us is doing something different to help these villages.”

Victor Martin agrees.

“It all comes together; it’s a team effort. God gives us the power to come together and do the mission,” he said.

Martin credits the strength of the team to the vision of Icel Rodriguez, director of global missions for the Florida Conference. Rodriguez and her husband, Armando, served in 2009-10 as missionaries at Quéssua.

“Icel looks at all the skill sets of the people and assembles the group,” he said. “Jen and I have military backgrounds, but we’re not experts in self-defense. Icel asked if we could do it and we said we’d do what we can.”

Rodriquez, however, is quick to give credit elsewhere.

“It’s all God — all of it,” she said. “Every step of the way God has put it all into place.”

Serguey Espinosa credits God for the unlikely circumstances that brought him to Quéssua. A dentist by training in his native Cuba, Espinosa said he had been praying for an opportunity to serve the church, “but in Cuba, when you say, ‘I want to work for God,’ they think you only work as a preacher.”

One day, there was a visitor from the Florida Conference to his church: Rodriguez, herself a native Cuban. She told Espinosa that they needed a dentist at the mission. In 2018, he was able to go and stay for a month; the following year, he was able to take wife Graciela and stay for two months. In June 2022, they were able to relocate to Angola full time as missionaries supported by the Florida Conference.

“I believe the most difficult thing in the life of a Christian is to be quiet and wait for the blessing of God,” he said.

He describes the ministry of the Quéssua mission simply: “All of this is a miracle.”

Joey Butler is a multimedia producer/editor for United Methodist News and Mike DuBose is a freelance photographer in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact them at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.