On A Mission

Written by Jessica Shillings

What do Bakersfield, Guatemala, Morocco, and Nigeria have in common?

Answer: Bakersfield Doctors

In fact all of these countries benefit from the skills of Bakersfield practitioners and other area medical professionals.

Countless members of the Bakersfield medical community make special mission trips to other countries each year to practice medicine free of charge for the third world’s poorest people. So many participate in these mission trips, in fact, that they form professional networks, as well as friendships along the way.

However, the real reward, according to those who have gone, is in challenging themselves as medical practitioners while performing miracles for patients who never imagined that their ailments could be addressed.

While no two experiences were the same, even for those who had worked in the same countries through the same international programs, the medical professionals agreed that what they bring back to their community when they return is a renewed belief in the power of medicine and a deeper appreciation for the advances in technology Americans often take for granted.

Guatemala

From the San Joaquin Valley, to the highlands of Guatemala, a team of Bakersfield doctors does mission work in that part of the world every year through a program known as HELPS International.

The HELPS program sends teams of 50-90 doctors, nurses, and ancillary help (helpers without medical training) of all kinds to Guatemala to provide free medical aid to the nation’s poorest people. Each of the participating medical professionals and assistants pay $2,000 for trip expenses. This nonprofit organization’s teams travel at different times of the year. Each spend five days in the country, typically seeing over 4,000 patients each trip. The group provides everything for itself while in Guatemala, including cooks and housing, and has full-time staff stationed in Guatemala after the doctors leave.

Bakersfield’s own HELPS team remains one of 10 HELPS teams on the ground in Guatemala each year.

The experience is truly life changing, remarked Deanna Salyards, a nurse practitioner. Salyards is the HELPS leader for the Bakersfield team, a position she has held for the last 13 years. Salyards has been active with the HELPS organization for 16 years.

In Salyards’ words, “It’s the reason I work the other 50 weeks of the year...It really opens your eyes to what’s important in life. It’s the little things that make a big difference.

“Life is a gift,” Salyards added, “Don’t take the little things for granted.”

An Adventist Christian who attends the local Hillcrest Church, Salyards sees her work in Guatemala as a spiritual journey that allows participants to literally experience many of the good works that the Bible calls churches to perform.

HELPS isn’t the only international mission experience Salyards has participated in. However HELPS has a level of quality control and follow-up that exceeds others, she said. For instance if a participant isn’t qualified to suture in the United States, they won’t be suturing in Guatemala.

Dr. John Young, a family practice physician of 30 years, also participated in the HELPS program.

Young, said his wife Dianne Young, a nurse practitioner, originally inspired him to pursue mission work in 1992. Four years later, Young would be leading his own HELPS teams to Guatemala. His last experience was in October 2010.

For Young, medicine in Guatemala is medicine in its purest form, away from many of the typical financial pressures of the profession.

“We just take care of people down there,” he said.

These circumstances make, “Problems here [Bakersfield] seem a lot smaller when you get back,” Young added. “You become so grateful for what you have.”

Yet in five days the HELPS team manages to see up to 2,000 patients, Young explained, and perform up to 200 surgeries. The team includes a number of professionals, with expertise including general, plastic, and eye surgery, to dental and sometimes prosthetic devices. Everyone on the team, doctor or not, has an important role to play, from the surgeons to the lay “runners” with no medical training who help the pharmacist with prescriptions.

“Sometimes it’s just glasses that make the difference,” Young said, describing his Guatemalan patients as, “extremely grateful.”

The second team that Young joined successfully removed cataracts from a woman’s eyes. Watching her see her baby for the first time, an infant who’d come to the team dehydrated and on the verge of death, is something Young says he remembers vividly as one of his most powerful experiences in Guatemala.

John Owens, M.D. is also a veteran of the HELPS experience in Guatemala, after his first international mission trip to Bolivia in 1997. He began working with the HELPS teams in 1998.

As an OB/GYN, Owens oversees deliveries and other types of genealogical surgeries that make a direct impact on the Guatemalan women he serves. His last trip to Guatemala ended in May.

“It’s kind of what you get in to medicine to do,” Owens said of the experience, “You can forget about insurance, HMOs, pre-approval...”

For Owens, some of the most rewarding procedures include plastic surgery, especially surgeries to correct cleft palates in young children.

Guatemalans line up for days to be seen by the doctors, Owens said, and are so appreciative when they receive care. Yet there are some who won’t get seen, and some who are beyond help that the team can provide, Owens said. A particular frustration for Owens is the frequency of cervical cancer cases in Guatemala, a disease that is very preventable with proper screening. This screening technology isn’t widely available in Guatemala, however, especially in the poor highlands.

Despite the challenges in Guatemala, Owens said he doesn’t feel badly for people he helps because, “They have things we don’t have,” including family members that stay geographically close to one another. Owens agreed that in Guatemala, everyone on the team is just as important as the other.

“You’re struggling,” Owens said of the experience in Guatemala, “but you’re struggling together.”

Anyone, regardless of whether they have medical training or not, can participate in the HELPS trips. All donations to the cause are tax deductible. One hundred percent of all dollars donated will be spent on supplies and other necessities required to support the team and its work.

Nigeria

Then there’s Dr. Eugene Kercher. He will never forget the two weeks he spent in Nigeria with the Heal Our World project this summer. As Kercher told it, this mission work was actually the fulfillment of a promise he’d made decades ago when originally applying to medical school.

“I promised my lord that if I got into medical school, I would use my skills to do mission work,” Kercher, a life-long Christian and former general practitioner in the United States Air Force, remarked.

While his stay in Nigeria, from August 27 to September 2011, was his first international mission experience, Kercher has dedicated his professional life as a physician to serving Kern’s under-privileged patients.

This background, specifically the decades spent specializing in emergency medicine and psychiatry, had made him feel as if he’d seen everything, Kercher said. Then he arrived in Nigeria and that perception was challenged to its core.

“I thought I’d experienced it all,” Kercher remarked, “but I felt so helpless trying to address medical needs when I didn’t have medicines and imaging...I’d never witnessed the poverty I saw in Nigeria.”

For the first week of his experience in Nigeria, Kercher and his wife, Sophia, also an RN, were largely alone, accompanied by only a few photographers from the organization. In the second week, the couple joined a number of Bakersfield doctors and nurses. In addition to working along side Nigerian doctors in emergency rooms, Kercher also spent time presenting workshops on medical topics for professionals in the country as well.

During the experience, the team was seeing 250-300 patients a day, Kercher said, in very tiny, often ill-equipped emergency rooms. This included addressing countless cases of malaria, one of Nigeria’s largest health problems. Nigeria, in fact, has 25 percent of the world’s malaria within its borders.

While Kercher and the team could offer a treatment for malaria, the heartbreaking reality is that these measures would often last only until, “the next mosquito bite.” This continual cycle of disease meant that many of Nigeria’s poorest residents would never be healthy enough to go to school or work.

Other conditions simply couldn’t be treated, Kercher said, especially given the challenges he faced without many basic pieces of medical equipment and even without electricity at times. In addition, the crowds that formed were often more than the teams could handle.

“The medical team saw patients with a wide range of medical conditions including cancer, malaria, viral and bacterial infections, HIV/Aids, stroke, high blood pressure, hypertension, and simple malnutrition and dehydration,” Kercher added. “People came from far and wide...to wait many hours for a doctor so that they could be treated by the team.”

For Kercher the experience confirmed the choice he’d made long ago to dedicate his life and medical skills to serving the poor.

Even so, “You can’t go on a trip like this without coming back with more compassion.”

Red Cross

Bakersfield native and registered nurse Diane Ellison serves as the Training Coordinator for Disaster Services at the local branch of the Red Cross. She recently returned from a two-year stay in Trinidad, as well as a prior experience in Morocco.

Ellison began working overseas after she retired from nursing in 2005. At the time she was fed up with the medical field, Ellison said, so much so, “I didn’t even want to take anyone’s blood pressure.”

Now, however, Ellison reports she is amazed at where her skills as a nurse have taken her. She served as a member of the Peace Corps from 2005 to 2008 before joining the Red Cross in 2008.

“It’s not easy,” Ellison said of her travels, “but, oh, how rewarding.”

Ellison said her experiences overseas, both in Trinidad and Moroco, changed her forever; to that point that when she returned to the United States between assignments, “I couldn’t stand it here, it’s so materialistic...”

Arriving in Trinidad in 2009, Ellison said she was largely focused on coordinating aide efforts for surrounding islands as well as some locations in South America. This work she described as mostly, “nuts and bolts stuff.”

While Ellison said she came to love the people in Trinidad, “My experience in Morocco (2005-2008) was far more remarkable.”

In both countries, “...I met the most hospitable and giving people,” Ellison commented. “When I left it ripped my heart out.”

The problem in Morocco was the high birth mortality rate among both babies and their mothers, Ellison reported.

Ellison was assigned to present basic health lessons to the public there, but she soon realized that this would be easier said than done—especially considering the male-dominated nature of the country had left a majority of its women without sufficient education to be able to read. This reality was highlighted for Ellison when a mother of young children asked for help because she could not read her children’s report cards. Because the mother was not allowed to leave her home unaccompanied by her husband, and because her husband returned home for work after dark each night, she couldn’t even ask the teacher for clarification.

In response, Ellison worked to empower the women in her Moroccan community by creating a series of literacy classes, as well as interceding with male business owners and government officials on their behalf. While the Moroccan women did not have the agency to push these issues, Ellison, as an American, did.

Ellison credits her experiences in both Morocco and Trinidad with removing “cultural blinders,” as well as forcing, her to, “rise to the occasion. I became more than I ever thought I could. I became stronger, a leader.”

That’s something physicians who participate in overseas missions will attest to.

For more information on the local branch of the Red Cross, visit www.kernredcross.org or call 661-324-6427. The local Red Cross office is located at 5035 Gimore Ave.

For more information on the HELPS program, or to contact its local organizers, email bakersfieldhelps@yahoo.com or visit www.helpsintl.org.

Article appeared in our 28-5 Issue - December 2011