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Powes to Begin Work in Uganda
As the primary author of this article, I get to share with you my side of how my husband, Larry, and I decided to take a deep breath and join the Mission Doctors Association as long-term medical missionaries. He can have his say the next time Elise strong-arms one of the missionaries for an article.
As Larry is the first to admit, I have been the primary motivator in this adventure, as I have always wanted to serve in some overseas capacity. Ever since I read a book as a child by Gordon Seagraves about his establishing a medical clinic in the jungles of what was then Burma, I have longed to do something like that. In fact, that is in part what motivated me to go to nursing school many years ago. A similar motivation, perhaps, led me to work in the pediatric operating room of a large public hospital, Cook County Hospital in Chicago, to help put myself through the University of Illinois School of Nursing. After I graduated and took a brief detour elsewhere, I returned to Chicago and found my way back to “County” as we who worked there fondly referred to it.
There is where I met Larry, a pediatric resident. We eventually married and had three children in quick succession. I had decided to go to law school right after we married, so I left nursing to embark on a long career in medical law and raising our by-then four children. When the children were still small Larry was offered an opportunity to go to either Kenya or Nigeria. He had become a board-certified pediatric neurologist, and I was half nurse, half lawyer – still doing a little clinical work as I finished up law school. Although I was excited by the prospect, Larry, the conservative side of our equation, was concerned about bringing the children to Africa and exposing them to the many potential diseases and parasites that lurk there. We explored other possibilities for overseas service and eventually agreed that when the children were grown, we would find a way to fulfill this desire to utilize our medical skills abroad.
Even though we never ventured to live in a developing country while raising our family, we did live in Germany and in quite a few places in the USA. That moving from place to place must be what gave all of our daughters the wanderlust. Among them, they have spent school years in Brazil, Nepal, England and Germany. However, it was our oldest daughter’s time in the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Burkina Faso in West Africa that reawakened our desire to fulfill our earlier dream of serving in Africa. While she was there, we visited her. One of the people she had become friends with was the nurse who ran the embassy health clinic where the Peace Corps volunteers and other federally employed ex-patriots received their health care. Pauline was thrilled to meet us, especially Larry “the Doctor”. She arranged for us to meet one of the two neurologists in the country and take a tour with him of the hospital in Ouagadougou, the capital city. What an eye-opener that trip was!
We saw first-hand what challenges health care professionals in poor African countries face: a whirlpool tub donated but not functioning because of lack of local repair services; an ekg machine in the embassy clinic that stands unused because of lack of paper; diagnoses for such “simple” conditions as seizure disorders, but no medication to offer except Phenobarbital; a patient offered medicine that should be given every 6 hours, but no clear means of explaining to the illiterate patient how to figure out when each dosage is due (they settled on a piece of paper with crude pictures depicting sunrise, noon, sunset and night); a women’s ward with far more patients than beds (none of which had linens), so many of the women slept on pallets on the floor.
There was also personal experience through our daughter: a friend from her village who went to Ouagadougou for an operation to enable her to have children, who died on the table. On my second visit, I met the young wife of my daughter’s African counterpart. She was thrilled with the inexpensive frying pans and necklace I brought her as wedding gifts. She was sent to the hospital in Ouagadougou for safe care during the last months of her first pregnancy, only to bleed to death during the delivery. Her baby, named Grace, was born on my birthday.
Something happened to us on that trip. We had reached a point where, although we are no longer young, save-the-world adventurers, in the face of such need we simply could no longer turn our backs on our old dream of serving overseas. Our children were out on their own, Larry had decided to begin an early retirement, and I was longing to return to hands-on, face-to-face service as opposed to the back room service that was my daily legal job with a large health carrier.
However, the road from that awakening to the realization of our dream has been fairly long and circuitous. We valiantly resisted the three-year commitment of Mission Doctors Association, but Elise (and Janice) deftly and steadily applied gentle pressure until we agreed to attend the weekend for physicians and spouses considering long-term missions. Lo and behold, just before we arrived for the weekend, a new request came to Elise, from Uganda, for a pediatrician and a nurse. We were a bit taken aback at the timing and the fit of this request. But we were also in the midst of a move from California to Portland, Oregon taking place in July. Were we to accept the invitation to serve in Uganda we would have to return to Southern California in August for training, barely six weeks after moving to our new house. How could we leave for three years after just arriving in Portland? What about the house and our four children? And perhaps most pressing to me -- what about our 15 year-old Labrador, my baby and last “child” at home? We finally convinced ourselves that since we felt so called to do the mission, the mechanics of house and home would somehow be taken care of. When Janice agreed to let us bring Tessa, the lab, along to the four-month training at the mission house, we were trapped. But the road was to take yet another unexpected turn. This one more serious than any we had faced.
Just a couple of weeks before our commissioning service at the end of our training, I learned that I had breast cancer. I could not understand how God had seemingly pushed and cajoled us into accepting a commitment to serve as medical missionaries, only to snatch it away at the last minute. And of course, there was the issue of facing my possible mortality far sooner than I ever expected. Needless to say, Larry, the conservative cautious member of our team immediately dropped all thought of serving in Uganda and worried incessantly that I, unrealistically, was far too focused on it.
Of course, you all know the ending of this story (at this point at least). After surgery and chemotherapy, I was declared cancer free, and my oncologist enthusiastically endorsed our plan to go to Uganda this fall. And so here we are. I am excited, overwhelmed, and terrified as we face our September 29 departure date. The same concerns are still looming: what to do about house and home, and how can we leave our four children for three years? (The dog is no longer with us.) Larry is plodding along quietly, as usual, no doubt hoping for some as yet unforeseen reprieve while still preparing for the medical challenges he expects and adapting his painting skills to an African environment so he can pursue them there.
Please keep us in your prayers. At times the path seems very uncertain and scary, but we are not turning back now. Stay tuned.
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