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GA06106
Presbyterians for Restoring Creation Awards
Dan and Elizabeth Turk receive lifetime achievement award
BY MIKE FERGUSON
BIRMINGHAM, June 20 * In honor of their vast and varied body of work * from reforestation to the prevention of malaria and HIV/AIDS * Presbyterian missionaries to Madagascar, Dan and Elizabeth Turk, received the William Gibson lifetime achievement award Tuesday by the Presbyterians for Restoring Creation.
PRC also gave its Restoring Creation Award to host Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley for its work helping to remove a concrete slab across the Cahaba River south of Birmingham in order to restore ecological balance.
Together with their trilingual children, Robert and Frances, the Turks have worked as PC(USA) mission partners in Madagascar since 1997, laboring in partnership with the 4,000 congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar.
An island off the east coast of Africa, Madagascar has 18 million people. About three-fourths of them live on less than a dollar a day. One child in eight dies of a preventable disease before reaching age five.
Elizabeth, a nurse, has focused her work on public-health programs that have kept Madagascar’s AIDS infection rate below two percent, much lower than rates throughout most of southern and central Africa. She also directs programs to distribute malaria-preventing mosquito nets free to pregnant women and young children.
She said it is a pleasure to partner with the Madagascar church because, like Presbyterians, "sharing the Word and doing good deeds are tied together." Pastors speak up on HIV and AIDS at virtually every worship service.
It also is exciting, she said, to live in a part of the world where new plants and animals are still being discovered. In fact, certain species of trees and orchids that grow in Madagascar have been named in honor of her husband.
Dan is a forester who has encouraged and helped arrange the planting of fast-growing eucalyptus trees used for fuel. He also has educated children about reforestation, and planted fruit trees in order to help stabilize farmers’ output. He said he is happy to share the award with people everywhere working to restore creation. "The church in Madagascar," he said, "feels strongly about preserving God’s wonderful creation."
Pat Goodman and Robert Hay accepted the Restoring Creation Award on behalf of the 15,000 Presbyterians in the host presbytery. They displayed before-and-after slides that depicted changes brought on by removing from the river the 30-foot wide, 210-foot long slab built 60 years ago by a mining company. Debris had accumulated upstream from the slab, which Hay called an "environmental barrier," since most slugs lived downstream and most fish upstream.
On the day the Army Corps of Engineers punched the first hole in the slab, an observer spotted a fish making that species’ first trip downstream in 60 years, Hay said.
The presbytery has purchased 440 acres near the river on which it hopes to build a youth-camp facility, Hay said.
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