— with medical outreach and street expo

HUNDREDS of residents turned out at the Herstelling Assembly of God Global Outreach Centre to benefit from the services provided at a medical outreach and street expo that was held as part of the church’s 50th anniversary celebrations on Saturday.

Held in partnership with the Giving Hope Foundation, some 11 doctors were on site volunteering their services and equipment, including the church’s pastor, Dr. Ravindra Shiwnandan and his wife Michele Shiwnandan.
Services provided included pap smears, vaginal inspection with acetic acid, breast examination, prostate screening, HIV testing, eye testing, blood pressure testing and glucose monitoring, etc, while there was also a blood drive.

The medical outreach follows a four-day series of domestic violence combating activities that the church held a few weeks ago.
“We’ve been doing these for the past 25 years. We would do them at our church, but we would also do them at outlying communities,” Dr. Shiwnandan said.

The medical outreach is not the only way that the church has been giving back to its community and society at large. Ten years ago the church established its Vocational Skills Training Institute, aimed at helping under privileged youths in the community through training in a number of vocational skills.
“Over the past 10 years we have trained about 3000 school dropouts and youths,” Dr Shiwnandan noted.

“We assessed the community and we noticed that there were a lot of school dropouts and low literacy rate and problems with drugs, problems with unemployment, lack of skills; so we thought a good thing to do would be to set up an institute to help the students.”

Working in collaboration with the Board of Industrial Training, the institute offers certification in Information Technology (IT), office procedures, catering, cake decorating, cosmetology, sewing, and floral decorations. In previous years, the institute had also offered training in welding, electrical installation and joinery.
Classes are open to persons from 16 – 35 years old. And everything is offered free of charge.

“It’s funded basically by the church in partnership with the Government of Guyana. In the past we’ve collaborated with the European Union and the Trust Bank. All of the instructors come from our church– generally volunteers– they do it as a service unto the Lord.”
A batch of 97 students is scheduled to graduate from the institute today.

Many of the students had their products from their classes on display at the street expo yesterday.
The activities culminate with the church’s official 50th anniversary ceremony next Sunday. Dr Shiwnandan took the opportunity to remind that the entire public is invited to the celebrations.