It was a stormy night. The wind howled and whirled the leaves through the cold air. I let my two dogs run free and trudged through the fields, disgruntled. I was in the last year of my surgical residency and the end of my training was slowly coming into sight. My wife Tina, a pediatric resident, and I had been dreaming of a lifelong mission in the 3rd world since our school days. So it was only a matter of time before we could make our vision a reality. I buried my hands deep in the side pockets of my lined jacket. My inner state of mind matched the bleak weather around me. Although everything had been going well for us professionally, I hadn’t been able to answer one nagging question for almost a decade: the question of God. As a doctor, I was familiar with death. Especially in South Africa, I had seen many of my patients die. Was there any real hope of life after death for them and for me? Were the words of Christ, which I had known since childhood, trustworthy or just an uncertain consolation? My inner agitation increased and finally burst out of me. As loud as a person can shout, I screamed out into the darkness of the night: “God, where are you? I want to see you!”
The longing for a personal God was never to leave me. I loved reading the stories of others who told me about their experiences with God. I observed my own life attentively. Tina and I had completed our specialist training. Our training at clinics in England, the USA, South Africa and Germany had broadened our horizons. It was obvious that a higher power had guided us from one crossroads to the next. With a trust in God as big as a mustard seed, we applied to a missionary organization to work at a missionary hospital in Ecuador. We emphasized that we saw ourselves first and foremost as doctors who also happened to be Christians.
The five years at the Hospital Vozandes del Oriente in Shell, Ecuador, shaped us in every respect. We got to know the organization of a missionary hospital that was permanently in the red and had to make do with sometimes antiquated equipment. We also observed that a hospital in debt tends to become more and more a facility for middle-class patients. However, every poor Indian who was sent away with a sigh of regret by the hospital management triggered an inner rumbling in us. Tina and I had no intention of investing our lives for the benefit of the rich. Our call was to the Indians of the Andes, whose fate had already moved us deeply on an earlier trip to Peru.
In January 2002, we sat down at our desks and spent long nights drafting a plan for a new hospital. In this hospital, the poorest people would be able to enjoy the highest possible standard of medical care. We quickly realized that building and equipping such a project would cost many millions of euros. Not to mention the long-term maintenance. We postulated a support group of 1,000 friends, the cooperation of around 30 volunteers and the willingness of many companies to donate extensive high-tech equipment.
With this plan, we returned to Germany in 2004 to promote our crazy company in the midst of the economic crisis at the time. Month after month, we drove up and down the highways. Wherever we had the opportunity, we unpacked our projector and laptop to let our hearts speak for us. Tina wrote around 1,000 handwritten letters that year. But despite all our efforts, only 251 donations had been received by the end of June. The dream was in danger of collapsing. But we didn’t throw in the towel because we were absolutely convinced that, with God’s help, this hospital could not only be built, but would be built.
Diospi Suyana means “We trust in God” in the language of the ancient Incas. And that is exactly what our planned hospital was to be called. This name was aptly chosen because – as we soon realized – God was making all the necessary contacts in the background.
We had always hoped to find a civil engineer who would supervise the construction of the hospital for us as a consulting partner. He was supposed to have a lot of experience and accompany the project on a voluntary basis. Unfortunately, our search for such a person had been unsuccessful. On February 16, 2005, I sat with a lawyer in our small attic apartment in Wiesbaden’s Westend district to prepare for the upcoming negotiations with the construction company Contructec. After all, the construction contract had a volume of almost USD 4 million, mind you, without fixtures and fittings. Suddenly the lawyer remarked that he knew someone who had worked abroad for Philip Holzmann for many years. My interest was piqued. “What is this man’s name?” My question was answered immediately: “Udo Klemenz”. As the lawyer had found the civil engineer’s telephone number in the depths of his briefcase, I immediately called him at home. “Mr. Klemenz, I heard from you two minutes ago, we are doctors who want to build a missionary hospital in Peru. Could you imagine running this project for free?” We agreed to meet that evening at his house in Solms. – What I didn’t know was that Udo Klemenz and his wife Barbara had been praying for a special mission from God for three days. The two of them traveled to Peru with our family in August 2005. As an engineer, Udo Klemenz supervised the construction of the hospital, the construction of a dental clinic and the building of a children’s home. The crowning achievement of his work is the construction of the Diospi Suyana school, which will provide countless Indian children with an excellent education.
The hospital’s construction work progressed steadily without a guaranteed budget, debt or loans. Financially, we were constantly living from hand to mouth. But construction never came to a standstill, as the necessary donations arrived unexpectedly at the right moment, which was often the last.
Nevertheless, the construction work remained laborious. There was no reliable internet connection, no cell phones and only nine payphones in the village, which worked rather poorly. We also had to cope with bad news. On December 17, 2005, customs at Lima airport took away my projector because I had failed to register the device on a form. Several high-ranking personalities, above all the German ambassador, tried in vain to get the projector released. I was deeply frustrated by this and had no choice but to buy a new projector in Lima. On February 10, 2006, I tested three different models in the showroom of a small company. I did this by clicking through all the slides of my presentation about Diospi Suyana. The president of the telecommunications company “Impsat-Peru” was standing behind me in a corner, unrecognized. The pictures grabbed him and he immediately sought a conversation with me. As a result, his company donated a satellite dish, which has connected us to the wider world via 36 telephone and Internet connections since spring 2006. The value of this extremely generous support so far is over USD 300,000.
The difficulties that sometimes stood in our way were immense and sometimes frightening. In June 2006, the Peruvian Cultural Institute imposed an immediate construction freeze. They said we had gone ahead with the construction without a license from the authorities. The threat of a fine of 700,000 USD could also mean the end of Diospi Suyana, depending on how things developed. As Alan Garcia had been elected as the new president on June 4th, I asked the German ambassador to arrange a private audience with the head of state or his wife Pilar Nores de García. Dr. Roland Kliesow wearily waved me off. Even for him as ambassador, a meeting with the newly elected presidential couple was not possible so soon after the election. But God obviously saw things quite differently. Through mysterious contacts in the background, my wife and I received an invitation to Mrs. Nores’ office for the 4th of July. Our laptop presentation went straight to her heart. By the time the 70-minute meeting had passed, the First Lady of Peru had long since decided to sponsor our project. As soon as this became official, the cultural institute withdrew all demands.
An impressive backdrop. Four and a half thousand people crowded impatiently into the amphitheater next to the Diospi Suyana Hospital. A full open-air theater, a large building complex next to it and huge snowy mountains in sight. Our dream of a modern missionary hospital, which Tina and I had pursued for so long, had become a reality for everyone to see. I stood up and stepped up to the microphone to give the opening speech. It lasted less than ten minutes and culminated in the statement that only God can create much from little and everything from nothing. God alone deserves the glory.
The hospital has been in operation since October 22, 2007. By February 2014, we had registered over 120,000 patient visits. They are not anonymous numbers in our file, but rather people from all parts of the country who have sought refuge at the hospital in the hope of a cure for their physical ailments. In the morning services, they hear that God loves them and that the very existence of the hospital testifies to the reality of God. Our facility is without doubt one of the best clinics in the country and its facilities are on a par with a German district hospital. 150 employees are committed to the large sign on the driveway to the hospital. It reads: Diospi Suyana – A hospital that passes on the love of Jesus. Diospi Suyana has made a radical change in our minds. My wife Tina and I now see ourselves first and foremost as Christians who are also doctors on the side, so to speak.
On September 17, 2009, the meeting room at Brunnen Verlag was filled with perplexity. Around 15 people looked thoughtfully around the room. What title should the book I had written about our journey of experience with God have? Perhaps “The Miracle of Peru” or “Hospital of Hope”? In the end, we were all on the spot. I quietly said a prayer and spoke up: “You know,” I said slowly, “when I wrote this report, I only had one title in mind. It expresses exactly what I want to say with this book. It is: “I have seen God!”
The construction of the mission hospital was Diospi Suyana’s first major project. This was followed by the inauguration of the dental and eye clinic on June 24, 2010 and the completion of a children’s house for the Diospi Suyana children’s clubs in April 2012. On March 14, 2014, we will open the Diospi Suyana School. The school and kindergarten will support the development of up to 650 children. We are grateful to have found an extremely capable director for the school in senior teacher Christian Bigalke. We do not know what ups and downs Diospi Suyana will go through in the future. But we place our lives and our life’s work in God’s hands.
The heart of Diospi Suyana is its employees. They currently come from 11 different countries. These doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and craftsmen invest the best years of their lives for God and their fellow human beings. Our special thanks go to them. Olaf Böttger, the chairman of Diospi Suyana, has held many threads in his hands since the founding of our association. Day after day he performs an invaluable service in the background. We would like to thank our supporters and friends worldwide. By January 2014, around 50,000 private individuals and 180 companies had donated a total of over USD 20 million.
In the New Testament, Paul writes: “But God can do much more than we can ever ask of him or even imagine. So great is his power that works in us!” This sentence has proven true again and again in the fascinating history of Diospi Suyana. Therefore, we thank God for His faithfulness and goodness. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the abbreviation “SDG” under each of his compositions. The three letters stand for Soli Deo Gloria and mean: “To God alone be the glory!”
Martina and Klaus-Dieter John
