I also visited friends who had started a small Bible college 11 km outside Petauke boma. Covenant College offers reformed Bible training to anyone, but especially to pastors of small churches in the surrounding rural areas. They attend the college from Tuesday to Thursday and return to their homes and churches for long weekends.
However, when the administration of the Petauke District Hospital (PDH) heard that I was staying at Covenant College and was a doctor who had once worked at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka as an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, they immediately asked me if I could help. There was no doctor working at PDH at the time and I was told I could be an answer to prayer. Having spent the previous six years in office work I had reluctantly accepted that medicine was past history for me. After a week spent in the hospital working with three medical students who happened to be there that week and doing two emergency Caesarean Sections (CS) on patients who might not have survived onward referral, the administration wanted me to stay.
Up to 95% of Zambian medical students leave the country after qualifying, apparently because of pay but these three students indicated they would consider working in a rural hospital if there were a senior doctor there. I am unable to sign a contract because of family commitments but so far have returned for one six week period. Asked by my church what they should pray for, I said ‘an open heart and mind’. The following may be part of the answer to their prayers and it may be but one of many new paradigms of medical and healthcare mission waiting to be discovered. Certainly, there are enormous needs and opportunities that the Western church is missing to its own loss as well as the Kingdom’s.
For this particular paradigm, experience in obstetrics in Africa was the best background. Referral of CS patients had become the biggest item of expenditure for the hospital. Contrary to cultural brainwashing, my hands and head had not forgotten how and what to do. Working with and under the eye of others, be they medical students, clinical officers, administrators or the local population in a small community, I felt that I would soon be told if I was past usefulness and safety.
Voluntary hospital work in another country does not fit easily into most administrative structures, but where there is a will, it seems there is a way. Re-registration with the Zambian Medical Council was achieved with the help of a caring hospital administrator who came to Lusaka to meet me. Without a contract, a work permit was not possible but the local immigration office put in process paper work that they said made me a legal volunteer. For those interested in finding new medical mission paradigms, I suggest looking for where you are really needed and potentially qualified, then discuss it with your spouse, ask your church to pray and explore the possibilities that may prove to be the Lord’s plans for you. If there is someone that you know who might fit such a bill but by reason of a previous missionary career cannot afford the luxury of working holidays overseas, why not set about helping him or her to go.
If you are worried about the possible consequences, remember it is work committed to the Lord and the outcome, for death or glory, is ultimately solely in His hands. One of the beauties of retirement is being able to abandon vested interests and a competitive spirit. One only needs to do what needs to be done. Those more spiritual than I will have abandoned these long before the age of 65. The following are some of the ways it has worked out so far.
Living with a mission team off site has been a great blessing. Their fellowship, family prayers, teaching and support have helped keep me on an even keel in what could, in a small community, become an ego trip and/or a disaster plunging one into depression. Their email contact through radio (Bushmail) with the outside world kept me in touch with home.
Keeping the hospital at a distance provided a triage that selected the workload appropriate to my age, energy and abilities.
Cycling to work kept me fit and passing along country tracks through villages and past a school is a happy experience, even opening an opportunity to speak on HIV/AIDS to the children at the local school. Asking the ambulance to make the 22 km round trip to collect me in cases of emergency has not seemed too demanding on hospital resources.
There is no telephone, so it was necessary to remain on the College site when not at the hospital. Teaching, whether formal or in-service, multiplies the value of the work, especially when it meets a need like setting a younger colleague up to do his own Caesarean Sections.
The hospital staff were super. One theatre sister cancelled her leave when she heard that there would be two doctors present!
At Covenant College there have been opportunities to share in the teaching (and learning) with the students. Initially, attempts to teach some appropriate medical ethics may have been over enthusiastic on both sides but gave some interesting insights into the impact of secular humanism spreading its tentacles into the healthcare systems of the developing world. There have been opportunities to contribute to the healthcare of students and staff (especially malaria prevention and treatment) and provide some teaching resources to enable them to be involved in voluntary healthcare of their homes and churches.
A conference in a church at the boma on ‘A Community Approach to HIV/AIDS for the Church’ saw the leaders of local churches sitting on the platform providing the focus for a three-hour discussion with those who attended. Recently, plans have been started to enable the College students to gain some experience in hospital chaplaincy. At the heart of reformed teaching is a zeal for Biblical truth that is vital when dealing with issues like AIDS and secular humanism. This can be balanced by the compassion required in comforting the sick and the dying and by the opportunity to work together over challenges common to a wide spectrum of believers.
In the end it is not what one has done that counts in the Kingdom but why one has done it and this is in the realm of grace, for faith itself is a gift and we are daily rescued from the clutches of a deceitful heart. ‘God-incidences’ along the way remind one of Who is in charge. Meeting up again with a wonderful and genuine medical mission family who have been turned out of their hospital through misunderstandings and fears in the local church was salutary. They had no bitterness, just peace in knowing they had served the Lord faithfully and prayed that He would bless that church in its turmoil.
The PDH administration is eager to recruit more volunteers - senior doctors with appropriate experience - or those who could sign a contract. They wish to make PDH a centre to which clinical officers, those being upgraded to licentiates (local doctors), medical students and junior doctors will come for clinical experience.
If you would like to know more about opportunities to use your clinical skills after retirement, or if you would like to be involved in the work of PDH or the Covenant College please contact the MMA HealthServe office.
