February 2010

• "They speak the same work"
• On a Mission to Zambia
• Download the full article as a

On a mission to Zambia

Ken Thomas of Haywood EMC in Waynesville is not only a skilled electric lineworker and the co-op’s manager of marketing and communications, he also is a well-traveled missionary. Haywood EMC supports Ken’s volunteer work with the international Christian relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, which is based in Boone.

Ken and his Samaritan’s Purse colleagues, including other North Carolina electric cooperative linemen, have traveled to such corners of the globe as Guatemala, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea and Belarus on missions to build and repair electric distribution systems, primarily for hospitals, in desperate and poverty-stricken regions.

In late October, Ken joined the most recent adventure in the southern African nation of Zambia. The tasks there over two and a half weeks included improving an electric supply system for the Mukinge Missionary Hospital where power outages occurred frequently, including during surgery, and sometimes lasted for days. By building a battery inverter system, the volunteer electrical engineer and electricians left the hospital an uninterruptible power supply. “In their operating theaters now they won’t even see a blink when there’s an outage,’ Ken said. They also installed an automatic transfer switch which activates a back-up electric generator when an outage affects other sections of the hospital, and they rebuilt lines and equipment to allow the hospital’s water supply to pump reliably.

Ken learned that the Zambia National Power Company (ZESCO) is so impoverished that it took four years to get electric service to a new missionaries’ home on the hospital premises. “They plan to build a school for nurses,” he said. “But unless someone else comes in to build the half-mile electric system, the Zambia power company won’t be able to reach it for 10 or 15 years.”

In May, Ken has scheduled to take more personal leave time to perform similar work with a Samaritan’s Purse mission to a hospital in Jordan.

—Michael E.C. Gery