Les and Debbie Dornan, missionaries in Nepal, appreciate the support they receive from Michigan.
Dr. Lester Dornon and Deborah Dornon serve as missionaries in Nepal. Churches in Michigan are among their covenant partners.
Debbie, from Ohio, is the coordinator of expatriate services at the United Mission Hospital Tansen and Dr. Les Dornon, born in Japan to missionary parents, is a senior physician at Tansen Hospital. They have served two terms in the country, 1990-2002 and 2012 to the present.
The Dornans shared the following in the Winter 2018 edition of New World Outlook, the mission magazine of the General Board of Global Ministries. …
“Living in Nepal means that prayer is a bit like breathing. Without the connection to God throughout the day, life can overwhelm us. Prayer is the way we get started each day—and we strive to end with thanksgiving for God’s faithfulness. We have seen many instances where prayer alone has made a difference—prayers for rain in a dry season followed by an unlikely storm to fill the hospital water tanks…prayers for a patient with no money and a difficult medical condition who was able to leave here healed and without a crippling debt…prayers for Les when he had a brain bleed and had to be helicoptered to the capital city for treatment and found himself to be the only conscious patient in the ICU overnight….the list could go on.
“We depend on prayers for our lives here, for our work, for the witness of the hospital and the church, and for our family living far from us. Knowing there are those who pray for us consistently keeps us moving forward in the difficult times. Prayers help us continue to say with assurance, Our God is faithful and good.
Father God, we pray for Nepal. We pray for your church in Nepal, which was founded upon the prayers of many believers in India and other countries before Nepal was opened to the western world. We pray for this church which has grown from nothing into a church with several million followers. Let your church be a light for all of Nepal, proclaiming your love and faithfulness. We pray for the leaders to be guided by your Spirit and to preach and teach your truth. We pray for the government of Nepal. We pray for honest men and women to be elected to office—and that they would place the good of the country over the hopes of gaining more for themselves. We pray for the culture of bribery and corruption to come to an end. We pray for United Mission Hospital in Tansen, Nepal. We pray for the physical needs—water, electricity, gas, medicines, and equipment. We pray for staff who are committed to caring for the hundreds of thousands of people who come through the hospital doors. We pray for the social services department as they seek to help the poorest of the poor. We pray for the patients to leave the hospital not only physically healed, but also more alive spiritually. Give everyone working in Tansen the grace to continue to serve always remembering the sign that proclaims, “We serve, Jesus heals.”
In their most recent newsletter, the Dornans shared more about their work.
“It’s been a month since we returned from our wonderful visit to the U.S. in December and January. Back in Tansen, we both jumped right back into work — we arrived Thursday afternoon, after an 11 hour bus ride, and went to work Friday morning. We always feel like we are getting too old for this!
“Each year we are seeing more outpatients, delivering more babies and doing more surgeries. The government has become more strict about visas and medical licenses here. Recently, there were several doctors arrested in and around Kathmandu who were practicing without a Nepal Medical License. UMN is very careful that we all have proper visas and licenses but it takes a lot of time and is very frustrating as the rules change sometimes daily.
“Les spends a lot of his time on Maternity and in the female clinic. We’ve had several difficult cases recently. Les was called about a woman who arrived with a retained placenta. She had delivered at a village health post then they sent her by jeep to Tansen. By the time she arrived, she had lost about half her blood. She is O negative, a rare type, so people were called to donate blood in the middle of the night. She had a cardiac arrest three times but was revived. They put her in the High Dependency Unit and she is recovering well. At the same time, twins were born prematurely. Those babies are doing fine even though they are very small. A woman was sent for a C-section. Unfortunately, the baby wasn’t able to keep breathing on his own. Les spent time comforting the parents. He lie awake some of that night trying to think of what they could have improved the babies chances. It’s hard when nothing we do seems to work.”
The Dornans plan to be in the U.S. visiting supporting churches July through October, 2018. Follow them on their blog, Hope For the Hills. Click here for the 2018 Friends of Tansen magazine.
~Important note from the Dornans: Please don’t post this information onto social media. It can be shared via email with friends. Thanks!
Last Updated on November 1, 2023