For the fifth time in 11 years, a local group of volunteers is heading to Ecuador to offer medical and dental services and other assistance for some of the South American country’s poorest residents.

A majority of the volunteers are members of Christ Lutheran Church in Whitefish. They include three physicians, a medical student, several nurses, two dentists and a dental assistant. While the medical team focuses on acute needs such as parasitic diseases and respiratory illnesses, other volunteers will lend their expertise in a wide variety of other services.

They will conduct a vacation Bible school session and help build restrooms at a church, among other tasks.

The group leaves March 23 and will be gone close to two weeks.

“It’s an opportunity to walk in faith and put our faith in action,” said Dr. Randy Butikofer, one of the family practitioners with the medical mission. “What I’ve realized is what a blessing it’s been to participate in this ministry.”

One of the most profound experiences for team members with past mission trips has been the “soles for souls” program in which volunteers wash children’s feet and supply them with new socks and shoes.

The group works with a factory in Ambato, Ecuador, that manufactures the shoes.

“If we can purchase the shoes in Ambato, we can forego the shipping costs,” Butikofer said.

Each team member packs extra bags to transport supplies as checked-in luggage, bringing only carry-on bags for their clothes and personal items.

“The sheer volume of medical supplies, dental, VBS supplies is a tremendous amount,” he said. “Previously we’ve been allowed two free checked bags; now we get just one free bag per international flight.”

Local hospitals have donated generous amounts of medical supplies. Team members are  collecting donations for about 700 hygiene kits that will be distributed to poverty-stricken villages in Ecuador. Donations of washcloths, soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes and combs are being collected.

Dr. Ron Miller, a retired family practitioner who is among the team members, said most of the Ecuadorians living in the remote villages they visit have no mode of transportation to access health care. The team will be headquartered much of the time in Zumbahua, a village high in the Andes Mountains.

“From there we’ll work on the building project and send teams to surrounding villages where people can’t get to medical or dental care,” Miller said.

Some time will be spent in Ambato, where the group will visit a shelter for domestic violence victims.

The mission trips to Ecuador began in 2003 when Shepherd’s Hand Clinic founders Jay and Meg Erickson organized the first team that conducted its mission through Volunteers in Medical Missions. Subsequent trips have been conducted independently.

Through the years Christ Lutheran has worked with Guillermo Vasconez, an assistant pastor in a congregation in Ecuador who serves the often invisible and neglected indigenous people on his own time, according to Christ Lutheran Senior Pastor John Bent.

“His work is not sponsored by any denominational program, but out of a love God has placed within his own heart for these people,” Bent said. “It amazes us that God would bring a former Communist youth leader to Christ, ordain him as a pastor of the Church of God and then use him to bring a Lutheran congregation in Whitefish to co-labor with him among the poorest of the poor in Ecuador.”

Everyone who has participated in one of the trips to Ecuador has had his or her life changed, Bent said.

“Relationships between caregivers and care receivers were formed that we will remember for the rest of our lives,” he said. “As we did triage, medical exams, played with children, washed feet, fit shoes, shared the Gospel and joined our voices in worship, we found that the lines were blurred as to who was the caregiver and who was the care receiver. We began to experience in a deeper way what it means to be part of the body of Christ taking his light into the world.”

Bent noted how Mother Teresa once responded to someone praising her for her work among the poor and dying in India: “We don’t do it for them, we do it for ourselves ... When we care for others, the ‘them’ becomes ‘we.’”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.