A Kazakh
Adventure
By Ken
Rutt, December 3, 2019
Saturday morning, 8:35 AM, January 15, 2005 - The voice on the phone from Moscow was muffled. I was having trouble making out what was being said. “Did you say $4,000? Or $40,000?” I asked, not sure I was hearing correctly.
“$40,000!” the crackly voice replied. “We need a credit card deposit for $40,000 before we can release the medivac plane. It is ready to leave the hanger with a doctor on board, but we need you to fax us your credit card information.”
My mind reeled. I looked around at the friends who had quickly gathered to support us in this crisis. What could I do? I had no credit card with anywhere near that credit limit. But my daughter’s life hung in the balance. I had been told only the hour before that my daughter was suffering from meningitis and needed to be evacuated from Kazakhstan to Finland for immediate treatment. The voice on the phone was the Moscow branch of the International SOS whom the mission agency overseeing my daughter’s team of young people in Kazakhstan had contacted to help with the air evacuation. The hospitals in-country were not trusted to handle this devastating illness and they were urgently telling us that we had to get Karisa to the Meilahti Hospital in Helsinki, Finland.
We had not been advised before this mission trip that we should buy medivac insurance, and now, as this news came crashing down upon us, I felt somehow small and helpless. But fortunately, there were friends gathered around. And even more fortunate was the fact that our church had started the year, January 2005, with a study on prayer called “40 Days of Prayer.” Just the Saturday before we had learned firsthand the power of corporate prayer. A little boy, the nephew of one of our church members, had been run over by a minivan while sledding on the street. The prayer-chain had instantly come alive with calls and updates. Now, it would be activated once again, reaching people around the country and the world to pray for my daughter. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this pattern of Saturday morning crisis and the urgent activation of the prayer chain would become a pattern that would repeat itself for the entirety of our 40-day study. It was a remarkable bonding exercise for our church members as we learned first-hand the power of prayer.
But for now, it was a foreboding crisis staring us in the face. My wife piped up with the helpful suggestion that her boss had told her, upon hearing the news, that we could use his credit card if needed. He had always been a big supporter of our children. And now I had no choice but to take him up on his offer. The only fax machine that was close at hand was at my neighbor’s, who had a landscaping business. Suddenly I was knocking on their door in the early morning, asking if I could have access to it. I have always contended that the man is truly blessed who has good neighbors and this was a time of blessing. Karen’s boss faxed me his card info and I combined it with my card and faxed it on to Moscow. Ironically, this nation which had previously been called the “Evil Empire,” was now the country that would be receiving my money and launching an airplane down the runway on its 1,000-mile flight to Kazakhstan.
The news from Aktobe, when it came, was good news, as the doctor flying in the special Red Cross jet examined Karisa in the bedroom of her host family’s home. He did not think that it was Meningitis! The symptoms did not align well with the normally rapid progression of the disease and she seems to be responding positively to the antibiotics that were administered. However, he could not specifically exclude it and was sufficiently concerned that they continued with the air evacuation to Helsinki. Her team leader, Becki, accompanied her on the plane and would stay by her side throughout the sojourn.
The admittance and care at this top-quality hospital was wonderful. They ruled out the worst diagnosis of bacterial meningitis but determined that they should do a spinal tap to confirm their diagnosis. Its results showed a count of only 6, on a scale where 0-5 is normal and 100 and above is a bad infection. So, we greatly praised the Lord for his miraculous provisions. The downside was that the spinal tap gave her an unremitting spinal headache. A very concerned doctor called and asked if they could have our permission to do a blood patch procedure. “Are you aware of what a blood patch is?” he asked.
“Yes!" I responded, “By all means. Proceed with the blood patch!”
Fortunately, an incident had preceded this doctor’s question that allowed me to quickly make this decision. We had been involved in a car accident some months before where our van ran over the driveshaft of a truck. It had been lying in the middle of the turnpike on a dark, rainy night. Hitting that bar of metal at highway speeds had upended it underneath the rear of the van, causing the rear of the vehicle to lurch upward like a bucking bronco. Lying on the rear seat, peacefully at rest, was my oldest daughter Kate. The shock of the blow launched her upward and severely twisted her spine. The ensuing spinal headache had only been mitigated using a blood patch. This procedure, which may well have originated in the wilds of Africa considering how it is done, is where they draw a syringe of blood from the patient’s veins. They then insert the needle of the syringe directly into the puncture wound that was caused by the spinal tap. The blood is injected into the wound, and, wah-la! The headache is gone! Who would have thought! But now, with the wonderful understanding that this could be the perfect solution, I was quick to agree. And the reaction was just as instantaneous with Karisa as it was with Kate!
The headache was gone and Karisa was recovering nicely. But Blue Cross, which up until now had been good with covering the hospital costs, now wanted to see this hospital stay ended as soon as possible. They were also non-committal on the cost of the air flight. That issue would lie in my mind, threatening to keep me awake at night. But for now, I needed to find someplace for Karisa to stay in Finland until she was strong enough to return to Kazakhstan. Our friends were incredulous that we were going to allow her to return, but she was adamant that her work in Atkobe was not done. She needed to return to her team members with whom she had established a strong and lasting bond. (That is another rich and amazing story!) My wife, Karen, for her part, would have been on the next plane out of Philadelphia headed for Finland if it had not been for Karisa’s clear direction that she was fine and did not need her mother to rush over to her. She had her teammate and better, she had her assurance of God’s presence. She would be fine with us remaining 4,000 miles away praying for her.
So now Karen was there with me as I brainstormed how to find a place for Karisa and Becki to stay in the remote country of Finland so that Blue Cross could save on some hospital bills. And again, God came through in a most wonderful way. There is a little Mennonite church in our area, curiously named Finland Mennonite. Someone told me that they were, appropriately enough, supporting some missionaries in Finland. I searched the web for the name of this mission family, the Longley’s, and got in touch with their sending ministry in Illinois. They gave me the contact information. Rather tentatively, I contacted them about the possibility of these two girls staying with them. I received their enthusiastic acceptance. Blue Cross, on hearing that I had found a place for them to stay, was rather more cautious. “Do you trust these people?” they asked. I told them that certainly I did. It would be a wonderful opportunity for these two groups to mingle.
And indeed, it was! It was a classic example of Mennoniting-your-way on an international scale. The Longleys drove the 40 miles from Turku to Helsinki and hosted the girls in their house for the next week as Karisa regained her strength. Two weeks after the adventure had begun, Karisa and her teammate were reunited with their host families in Aktobe. Karisa claims that before she got sick, she had been treated very kindly as a guest in the house. But upon her return, she was treated as family. The bond that united her to this secular Muslim family had been forged even tighter through this struggle than by the wonderful Kazakh hospitality had initially created it. A year later, her “Kazakh sister” and cousin would accompany our American family on a trip across America to visit the wonders of Sequoia, Yosemite and the Pacific seacoast. It was on that trip that I shaved my mustache for the first time in my married life. I had done it only as a whim. But in that deed I was able to see some of the effects of the cross-pollination that had taken place between my daughter and this Kazakh girl. “Why did you do that?” was the question asked by my incredulous family upon seeing my upper lip exposed for the first time.
“I think the Holy Spirit told him to do it!” came the response from this precious Muslim girl. It was a response that made so much of what had transpired over the previous years seem all worth well!
Part of what had transpired was the issue of who was going to pay for that medivac cost. I had withdrawn money from my retirement account so that I did not have to pay the exorbitant interest expense associated with a credit card. And I had used that money to pay off Karen’s boss. But he kept telling me that I needed to continue to put pressure on Blue Cross who was remaining non-committal about paying for those expenses. For my part, I had laid the matter aside, trusting that somehow God would work it out as he had all the other challenges presented along this journey. One Friday evening, two months after Karisa was again back in Aktobe, I got a call at about 9PM from Blue Cross. “Mr. Rutt, this is Sharon from Blue Cross. I got your claim for the medivac cost for your daughter Karisa this week. It was the largest, single-line-item bill that ever came across my desk! But I carried it around and got all the signatures on it. I wanted to inform you that we are paying the bill in full!”
Wow! This was such good news. And Sharon had done this just because of a feeling that it was the right thing to do! She was not even aware that Karisa had to be medevac’d because she would not have been allowed on a commercial flight in her condition. I was able to spend the next 45 minutes on the phone with her, filling in all the details of the marvelous story. My guess is that Karisa’s saga was going to be recounted to the others at Blue Cross for some time to come by this wonderful lady. And who can blame her? The Israelites recounted their crossing of the Red Sea for years afterward!
Back in Sunday School class in church however, the Saturday morning prayer chain alerts on each successive week of the “40 Days of Prayer” study were continuing. On the third Saturday, news came from my mother-in-law that a good friend had died attempting to light a woodstove in his house. For some reason it had exploded, burning and fatally injuring him. And then on the fourth Saturday, I was unable to get the door open into the upper room at Denny’s house where we always held our 6AM Saturday morning Bible Study. So, we went down the road to eat instead at The Heritage restaurant. As we were eating, the fire engines went screaming by the restaurant. I told my friends that that did not look good. I went back over the awful things that had happened on each of the previous Saturday morning. Hopefully this was not another of those nasty happenings.
But it was. The electrical heating tape in the ceiling of the room at Denny’s house -- the room where we would have been meeting if the door had been open -- overheated and started the attic timbers on fire. The fire spread across the attic space and threatened to burn through the roof. Quick response from those wailing fire engines had saved the house from burning completely. Smoke and water damage were extensive, but Denny still had a house to live in, praise God!
So ended a live exercise in “40 Days of Prayer”! Who would have imagined that God could reinforce these teachings in such powerful ways? It was all part of a much longer journey of experiencing God’s hand in one’s life and of seeing how we are “surrounded by his favor, as with a shield."
Wow...God is so faithful!
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