Now, he says he is looking forward to going on a third one.
He and his wife, Angeline, went on that trip to Haiti last year — she was one of the nurses — and this March accompanied Fr. Muma to the west African nation of Cameroon. And they plan on going back to Haiti next year.
But they almost didn’t go on the first one. “After hearing about the plans for last year’s Haiti trip, my wife and I discussed it and came to the conclusion we just couldn’t afford it,” Kowalski recounted.
“Five minutes later, Fr. Muma called up, and she says, ‘Oh yes, Fr. Muma, we’ll be going.’ I asked her, ‘hadn’t we just discussed this?’ but she said, ‘I just couldn’t tell him no.’”
On the March 2-13 medical and humanitarian mission to Cameroon, while Angeline Kowalski worked with the doctors and other nurses on the trip, Dave — an engineer, electrician and plant manager — was doing things such as erecting swing sets for village children or seeing to the logistics of getting the volunteers around the country.
“With 17 people, there were a lot of things to move around,” he said.
Two doctors, a dentist and seven nurses went on the mission, which visited major cities such as Bamenda and remote villages in the country’s interior. They also delivered food to three orphanages in the places they visited.
Most of those on the trip were from Our Lady of Mount Carmel or Fr. Muma’s previous parish, St. Paul on the Lake in Grosse Pointe Farms.
It was Fr. Muma’s third return trip to his home country since his ordination in Detroit in 2008, but the first as part of a medical mission.
“Our reason for going was out of the love of Jesus; we see ourselves as on a mission for Chirst,” Fr. Muma said.
“In Cameroon, most people are very poor and don’t have a lot of medical attention. They were very excited, as they are not used to seeing people come from another country to help them,” he said.
Kowalski said there would be as many as 800 people waiting for them when they would arrive in a town or village.
The lack of much medical attention means many illnesses go undiagnosed, and with a diet high in sodium, many people there have high blood pressure.
Diane Yenchick, one of the parishioners from St. Paul on the Lake on the mission, said malaria, complications from malaria and skin disorders were common, as well as sexual diseases, she said, noting that polygamy is widely practiced in Cameroon.
Yenchick, who is in sales with a large pharmaceutical company, serves as president of the Haiti and Africa Relief Team, a nonprofit organization formed to continue the mission trips begun when Fr. Muma was at St. Paul’s.
Its first three trips were to Haiti, as will be the next one, coming up in June.
Those who go on mission trips pay they own way — a little over $2,000 each for the Cameroon trip — and HART raises money to pay for its organizational expenses.
Now that the group has 501(c)3 nonprofit status, Yenchick said she hopes it will start receiving tax-deductible donations to supplement the money it raises from bake sales and its annual Christmas concert.
HART has a 14-member board, and St. Paul parishioner Thomas Graves, M.D., who has a family practice in New Baltimore, is its medical director. Graves, his wife, Anne, and daughter Sarah, 18, were on the Cameroon trip.
Yenchick said the Cameroon trip was spiritually rewarding for her, “because the people in Africa love Jesus so much — we went to Mass with them, and prayed with them, and sang with them. It was wonderful to share the faith with them.”
Kowalski said his two trips have had a real effect on him.
“We prayed and had Mass every day,” he said. “Fr. Muma was wonderful — he brought prayer into everything we did. I look for that in my life every day now — something I didn’t do prior to that.”
