Above, Karin Feltman, a Lawrence Memorial Hospital nurse, performs an eye exam on a boy while serving in Haiti on a 10-day mission trip, one year after a devastating earthquake rocked the country.
Lawrence native Karin Feltman told Rotarians at Lawrence Central Rotary on May 22 that she has a “heart for service.” Feltman, a nurse, has been on 15 medical mission trips between 2005 and 2011. Now she’s raising funds and making preparations for a medical mission in Nepal that she believes will last five years.
“I’ve been to Kenya, Malawi, Honduras, Haiti,” Feltman said. Every trip has begun because she was listening to her “little voice” that gave her a sense of what she needed to be doing to find meaning in her life. Now the trip to Nepal will be longer lasting because, she said, that while help with emergencies is good, there is a need for sustainable service that involves truly living in a place. “I want to work with wellness, teaching, and to improve family life there. “
Feltman will work through Evangelical Alliance Mission TEAM at Dadeldhura hospital in the Himalayan foothills. TEAM is an organization that has pioneered medical work in Nepal since the 1960s. It has grown out of a mission movement begun in the United States in 1890 by a Swedish immigrant, and has sent out thousands of workers.
Fund raising is important as she will need to support herself, which costs approximately $3600 per month. Several fund raisers have already been held in Lawrence and she said donations are welcome.
Feltman, (whose first name is pronounced Car-in; her mother was Belgian, she said, and pronounced it that way) is studying to learn the Nepalese language. “It’s difficult and very different from the romance languages common in this country. I do my best to adapt to the customs, the language and the food wherever I am,” she said, although she admitted to having a hard time on some of her trips with the native wildlife, primarily spiders.
She plans to leave for Nepal in January 2014.
“I walk by faith and not by sight,” she said.
