Do Something World Festival wraps up week-long campaign of volunteer service

May 15 2010

Do Something World Festival wraps up service that included health education for kids

California Pastor Miles McPherson returned to the Caribbean this week with a large team of volunteers to "do something" for the region.  McPherson, a former NFL Player, Senior Pastor of the Rock Church, San Diego and founder of Miles Ahead has produced the Cayman Islands "Do Something World Festival," to take place May 14-15.

The festival is expected to be the largest of its kind in the Islands' history, and wraps up a week-long campaign of volunteer service the ministry, including a group of 90 Californians, brought to the island. The San Diego contingent included a team of medical professionals who provided a series of health education seminars to more than 500 children, ages 5-11.

"Improving the quality of life for the Cayman people is at the heart of the medical team's outreach," said Joshua Kirby, an Emergency Medical Technician from San Diego, Miles Ahead volunteer and a member of the Rock Church.

The medical team presented several seminars at the John A. Cumber Primary School in the West Bay region, featuring information on diabetes prevention, diet, hypertension and healthy lifestyle choices. They chose these topics because data released by the Cayman Islands Health Services Authority (HSA) last September showed that childhood obesity is a growing problem in the Cayman Islands. In fact, the findings showed that one in every five children ages 11-14 are overweight.

Rolston Anglin, the Cayman Islands Government's Minister of Education visited John A. Cumber with McPherson to observe the volunteers' efforts. Said Anglin, "It is of great value to the community, to the school, but more importantly to the Ministry of Education."

Other services donated by the San Diego volunteers include:

• Ministry and outreach to troubled teens and prisoners.
• Building 12 new classrooms in the West Bay area of Cayman, adding 3,500 square feet of classroom space to overcrowded schools and saving the local government $1.2 million in the process.
• Working with local church leaders to help jumpstart their own service projects that can be sustained after the volunteers depart.
• Training Cayman ministry leaders how to start a deaf ministry.