…Rev. Huldah to be special guest at Calvary Assembly of God in Ozone Park
Rev. Huldah Buntain will be special guest speaker at Calvary Assembly of God, 102-07 Rockaway Blvd, Ozone Park, NY 11417 on Sunday March 11 at 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.
In 1954, Huldah and her late husband, Rev. Dr. Mark Buntain, were asked by the Assemblies of God Missions Department to go to India as Evangelists for one year. They sold their car, packed some clothes and boarded a ship with their baby daughter, Bonnie, headed for Calcutta.
After three months at sea, they arrived in the city of joy with its teeming millions of people jostling on the sidewalks and congested traffic. They quickly noticed the diverse social groups of the wealthy and abject poor. Mothers nursed their children on the roadside, children in rags played with scrap metal or plastics, bony elderly people laid nearly naked on the sidewalk. Hygienic conditions were poor, food and shelter were so limited, and so many were out of work. They saw children with cleft palates hardly able to eat or breathe freely, so many were either blind or had serious vision issues, and yet others walked or crawled on their broken or deformed limbs.
That “one year” turned into a lifetime of service to the people of Calcutta and its five surrounding states. Together, they established holistic inner-city and outreach ministries consisting of more than 200 schools with 32,000 children including a blind school, and also a large vocational school. The work in these five states has grown to include 1,000 churches, 5 bible schools, daily street and school feeding programs for 25,000, a nursing school, teacher’s training college, and a full general Mercy Hospital that has treated 2.2 million people and provided free care to 880,000 patients.
After her husband passed away in June 1989, Huldah became Chairman and Senior Pastor of the Calcutta Mission for a number of years. Huldah’s good friend in Calcutta, Mother Teresa, affirmed what Huldah could not deny: “I will miss [Mark] very much. We worked well together. You must carry on the good work. We must continue loving the poor.” Huldah continues to feed, educate, and medically assist the poor of the city.
At age 93, Huldah still travels extensively in the United States and around the world, and back to Calcutta several times every year, raising funds for projects in all of the vast areas that come under the Calcutta Mercy Ministries.
