Meet our Missionaries, David and Laura Parajon

Thanks to missionary support, David and Laura Parajón have the opportunity to dedicate themselves as physicians and public health professionals to the ministry of AMOS Health and Hope. AMOS stands for A Ministry of Sharing and is also named for the prophet Amos because of his sensitivity to poor and marginalized populations. The mission of AMOS is to witness to rural communities by sharing the Gospel and serving rural communities with basic preventive health care so that children and women do not die of easily preventable deaths.

In Nicaragua, many children die from completely preventable causes of death simply because they live in extreme poverty and because they lack access to healthcare. David and Laura Parajón train local village leaders to become barefoot doctors, or “health promoters,” who can treat the most common illnesses and prevent unnecessary deaths in children and women. They see the community as partners and accompany them in identifying and solving problems like anemia, malnutrition and the need for clean water. Since they helped found AMOS in 2006, it has grown from a few people serving a handful of communities to an organization now working in 34 rural communities and serving more than 20,000 people. Over the past five years, support from American Baptist churches like ours has made the following possible:

1. Trained and supported over 30 health promoters who took care of over 81,866 rural clinic visits and 22,288 home visits to people who would otherwise have no other access to health care.
2. Prevented child deaths through the network of health promoters and their ability to detect signs of danger.
3. Provided over 1000 families with clean water filters to prevent diarrhea.
4. Developed a functional community-based primary health care system to serve the rural poor that can serve as a model for other low-resources settings.

If you want to find out more about their work, visit the web site www.internationalministries.org and type in Parajón. You can also make on-line contributions to their ministry.