CONSIDERING MISSIONS

I've spent the last few days at our national Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery meeting in Washington DC and as always am coming away with new thoughts and ideas.  The past couple of years I've gone to every cleft course offered.  One course led to my getting additional training at the University of Arkansas with cleft surgeon Dr. Lisa Buckmiller, who has extensive cleft training and who has done missions throughout her career.  She is who invited me to Guatemala with their team.  The trip was awesome as I could work with 3 other cleft surgeons who you read about on earlier blogs from October 2011.  I was trying to decide what to do next when I found Dr. Fletcher's mission in DR Congo.  Although I have another opportunity to return to Guatemala, I decided the trip to Africa had so much to offer, that I have decided to go there instead.  One of the main factors primary factors in this decision is the opportunity to teach the local physicians.  Dr. Fletcher has been working hard for years to improve the level of health care in the poorest country in the world.  I attended several hours of humanitarian meetings in DC and every one of them made the point of how important it is to teach.  There were stories of setting up ENT residency programs, literacy programs in slums, and training the local physicians in every way.  A couple of groups 'put themselves out of business' by returning year after year, bringing supplies and training the local doctors to the point where they aren't needed to do the surgery as they have well trained specialists. None of my previous missions focused on training, and  each time I talk to Dr. Fletcher about what surgery we might do, he reminds me that it has to include teaching.  They have Family Practice residents and medical students with a fair amount of book learning, but very little 'hands on' experience so we probably won't do the large numbers of cases, but rather a smaller number, but allow the Congolese doctors to do as much as they can. Dr. Fletcher, himself, does some ENT surgery so we'll teach him as much as we can so he can use to teach more incoming doctors.
We will also have the advantage of an American trained general surgeon who can do followup care.  This is a huge advantage.  Missions always leave you with a sense of concern about what will happen to the patients after the team leaves, so this will be a great help.
One of the humanitarian speakers so aptly pointed out that there are lots of people who say they want to go, but in the end, the time, the money and the 'outside your comfort zone' factors limit who actually is able to take the leap of faith to go.

John and Nila Novotny in Guatemala 2011

The meeting has me more inspired than ever for missions and now has given me some additional tools to help organize things and places to look for donations.