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Oak Island couple has worked tirelessly abroad for their church | StarNewsOnline.com
Pat and Walt Ebert have had a lot of adventures in the past 15 years as lay missionaries with the United Methodist Church.
Walt, a retired logger from upstate New York, said, “In 1995, I was sitting in the congregation at Ocean View UMC when they asked for chain saw operators to help clean up Hatteras after a hurricane hit. I owned two chain saws, so I volunteered.”
Walt enjoyed the work so much, he signed up to go to Jamaica for two weeks to help build a church.
When he returned, he talked Pat into joining him for a two-week stint in Stanleyville, Guyana, where they were part of a team of 11 who built a church.
It was quite an adventure.
Pat discovered that tarantulas in Guyana “were the size of dinner plates.”
“We slept on a veranda, and every night we went to sleep looking at the Southern Cross constellation,” she said.
Their next trip was a two-week stay in Sierra Leone.
After they returned from Sierra Leone, Pat and Walt decided to apply for long-term mission work. They underwent five months of training in Atlanta before returning to Sierra Leone, where Walt visited villages finding people who were in need of medical help.
He transported them in his old Chinese-made military vehicle to government hospitals. He and Pat often paid for medical care out of their own pockets.
A 7-year-old orphan boy whose leg was eaten away from his ankle to his knee by infection was treated locally by visiting German doctors who felt he needed to go to the United States for further treatment immediately.
Pat went to work unraveling red tape and soon the boy was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, being treated by Dr. Ian Zotolow. The boy’s leg was saved and Zotolow adopted him. As a teenager living in California, the boy is a goalie on his soccer team, plays basketball and rides his bicycle.
One of their local workers found a teacher of the deaf, a woman who had a fifth-grade education, and asked Pat and Walt to start a school for the deaf. Pat and Walt have three hearing-impaired daughters, so the request touched their hearts.
“Being born deaf is common in Sierra Leone,” Pat said. “Deaf people are treated badly. Often they are spit on.”
The school started with seven students in an abandoned school. Now there are 86 students in two classrooms, ranging in age from 4 to 37. The school has a vocational component where students learn tailoring, weaving, carpentry and agriculture.
The local chief wanted a similar vocational school for students with hearing, so Walt made a deal with him to build four new classrooms, and two would be for deaf students.
“We were shocked and honored when they named the school ‘the Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf,’ ” Pat said.
The Eberts returned to Oak Island when Walt had medical problems that started when he served in Vietnam. They are still busy doing short-term mission work.
Walt helped build a church in Virginia, and most recently they went to London, Ky., serving 27 churches building and repairing churches, garages, roofs, wheelchair ramps and pastors’ homes.
For more information about their mission work,
e-mail Pat and Walt at prayerpartnerx2@yahoo.com.
Pat and Walt Ebert have had a lot of adventures in the past 15 years as lay missionaries with the United Methodist Church.
Walt, a retired logger from upstate New York, said, “In 1995, I was sitting in the congregation at Ocean View UMC when they asked for chain saw operators to help clean up Hatteras after a hurricane hit. I owned two chain saws, so I volunteered.”
Walt enjoyed the work so much, he signed up to go to Jamaica for two weeks to help build a church.
When he returned, he talked Pat into joining him for a two-week stint in Stanleyville, Guyana, where they were part of a team of 11 who built a church.
It was quite an adventure.
Pat discovered that tarantulas in Guyana “were the size of dinner plates.”
“We slept on a veranda, and every night we went to sleep looking at the Southern Cross constellation,” she said.
Their next trip was a two-week stay in Sierra Leone.
After they returned from Sierra Leone, Pat and Walt decided to apply for long-term mission work. They underwent five months of training in Atlanta before returning to Sierra Leone, where Walt visited villages finding people who were in need of medical help.
He transported them in his old Chinese-made military vehicle to government hospitals. He and Pat often paid for medical care out of their own pockets.
A 7-year-old orphan boy whose leg was eaten away from his ankle to his knee by infection was treated locally by visiting German doctors who felt he needed to go to the United States for further treatment immediately.
Pat went to work unraveling red tape and soon the boy was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, being treated by Dr. Ian Zotolow. The boy’s leg was saved and Zotolow adopted him. As a teenager living in California, the boy is a goalie on his soccer team, plays basketball and rides his bicycle.
One of their local workers found a teacher of the deaf, a woman who had a fifth-grade education, and asked Pat and Walt to start a school for the deaf. Pat and Walt have three hearing-impaired daughters, so the request touched their hearts.
“Being born deaf is common in Sierra Leone,” Pat said. “Deaf people are treated badly. Often they are spit on.”
The school started with seven students in an abandoned school. Now there are 86 students in two classrooms, ranging in age from 4 to 37. The school has a vocational component where students learn tailoring, weaving, carpentry and agriculture.
The local chief wanted a similar vocational school for students with hearing, so Walt made a deal with him to build four new classrooms, and two would be for deaf students.
“We were shocked and honored when they named the school ‘the Ebert-Kakua School for the Deaf,’ ” Pat said.
The Eberts returned to Oak Island when Walt had medical problems that started when he served in Vietnam. They are still busy doing short-term mission work.
Walt helped build a church in Virginia, and most recently they went to London, Ky., serving 27 churches building and repairing churches, garages, roofs, wheelchair ramps and pastors’ homes.
For more information about their mission work,
e-mail Pat and Walt at prayerpartnerx2@yahoo.com.