There was a sense of emerging from a time-travel machine when Dr. Dick Schilling and his wife arrived in the town of Bomet in Kenya, East Africa, late in October, 1984. Schilling, a general surgeon, and his wife, Betty, had paid their own way to come to Bomet to work as volunteers for two months in Tenwek Hospital, operated by the World Gospel Mission of Marion, Ind.
Schilling had taken a leave of absence from his practice in Bloomington, Ind., where he was used to performing surgery at Bloomington Hospital. It is the sort of state-of-the-art medical facility you would expect to find in a thriving American university town. Tenwek Hospital, on the other hand, as the Schillings found it in 1984, was less well-equipped than the average small-town American hospital when he entered medical school at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1948. The 140-bed facility, 120 miles northwest of Nairobi in the highlands of Kenya, is 2 miles from the nearest paved road, serving an area with a population of 300,000 tribal people.
The mission hospital averages 325 admissions a day, three patients to a bed in the pediatrics ward and two to a bed in the adult wards. Schilling was put to work immediately upon his arrival, assisting the hospital`s four doctors and four registered nurses. He was on the job from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., performing at least five major surgeries five days a week and three on Saturdays. The surgical instruments he was given would have been thrown out and replaced years ago in any American hospital. The sutures he was provided he hadn`t seen in use for 20 years back in Bloomington.
”The hospital had good textbooks,” Schilling recounts, ”so I`d read up for the procedure on something one night, then go in the next morning and perform it. You had to interpolate and adjust like a good carpenter forced to do a job without all his tools.”
On the face of it, Dick and Betty Schilling seemed an unlikely pair to find toiling away in a Third World missionary hospital. Back in Bloomington, they had a marriage and a lifestyle that was more or less the embodiment of the American Dream. Along with his successful surgery practice, he also had a separate, lucrative income from a side business investing in oil and gas exploration.
They had a comfortable life in a handsome four-bedroom ranch home on a wooded acre in Bloomington in which they had nurtured and reared three happy children to adulthood. They had the means to keep up a summer home on Glen Lake, near Traverse City, Mich., and a winter home in Naples, Fla.
Adventuresome spirits, they loved to take long excursions, exploring China, Southeast Asia and Europe. The Schillings were among the most respected couples in Bloomington, living the lives of ”Brahmins” in a small Midwestern city, as one close friend puts it. Schilling was 56 when they left for Kenya, Betty 54. They made a handsome couple. He maintained his youthful, rugged good looks from his days as a Big Ten baseball player as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She was a 5-foot-2 athletic dynamo whose open friendly compassion was the perfect counterpoint to his intensely serious nature.
But the Schillings were also devoutly religious, deeply involved in the church life of their community. Schilling, his wife and each of their three children had separately undergone ”born again” religious experiences in the 1970s. And though he was a lifelong churchgoer, Schilling says his own born-again experience implanted in him a longing to ”give away” his surgical talents to the needy as an expression of his faith.
”What I really wanted to do,” Schilling says, ”was work for free some place in this country, like an economically depressed area in Appalachia. The funny thing is, with expenses like malpractice insurance, nobody can afford to do that sort of thing.”
Early in 1984 somebody gave Schilling a pamphlet describing the work being done by volunteer physicians through World Medical Mission. The organization had been founded in 1977 by brothers Lowell and Richard Furman, who had medical practices in Boone, N.C., and who had long admired the work and sacrifices of medical missionaries. The Furman brothers had wanted to spend a couple of months each year going abroad to mission hospitals to donate their talents and help alleviate the workload of permanently stationed missionary doctors. They envisioned their services as a sort of relief duty, filling in for mission doctors who were away on leave.
When the Furmans discovered that there was no agency to which they could volunteer their services, they started their own. Since then World Medical Mission has sent out some 150 doctors to 40 mission hospitals in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The volunteer doctors pay their own transportation costs and living expenses, donating their medical expertise to the mission hospitals for two to three months at a time.
Not-for-profit and nondenominational, World Medical Mission serves Protestant mission hospitals of all persuasions. Though it is headquartered in Boone, it recruits volunteer doctors throughout the United States.
Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, helped organize World Medical Mission and now is president of the organization, which has grown dramatically every year since its founding. This year it plans to send out 60 doctors willing to take a leave of absence from their comfortable lives and the security of the technological wizardry that fills the typical American hospital.
”It is a considerable investment for a doctor to make,” says Preston Parrish, executive director of the organization. Most of the volunteers, he says, are physicians who hold the same deep religious convictions as the permanent mission doctors they go to help. Many of the relief volunteers, Parrish says, find the experience so rewarding that they come back to volunteer two or three months every year, receiving nothing in return but the privilege of writing off their expenses on their tax returns.
After reading over the World Medical Mission pamphlet in early 1984, Dick Schilling sent off an application. He did it, he says, with more curiosity than enthusiasm. His application, however, set off a series of events that ultimately have had both inspiring and grievous consequences for Schilling and his family.
He was surprised, in August, 1984, when the agency called to say it had accepted his application. He was asked if he could fill an urgent need for a surgeon at Tenwek Hospital in Kenya starting in late October.
”They caught me a little off-guard with such a sudden request,”
Schilling says, ”but Betty and I thought about it and prayed about for a day or so, and we accepted it.” He then spent three weeks taking crash courses from other doctors in Bloomington on types of surgery with which he was unfamiliar. He knew he would be called upon to perform them in Kenya, things like Caesarian sections and orthopedic procedures. He also learned how to administer anesthesia, knowing he would have to do that himself in the mission`s operating room.
His wife was totally enchanted with the idea, calling her children as soon as they made the decision to go.
”Do you know what your father is going to do?” she asked Nancy, their youngest daughter. ”We`re going to Africa!”
”Nobody likes to see their parents leave for some unknown adventure to a place where you`re not entirely sure everything will go all right,” Nancy recalls. ”I wasn`t especially crazy about them going. But Mom was so proud of my father. And she was so excited; she couldn`t wait to go over there and absorb the people and cultures. The only thing that bummed her out was that the hospital had a dress code for women that insisted they wear dresses and skirts, so she couldn`t wear pants. She loved to bounce around in little pink velour sweat pants.”
Betty Schilling busied herself organizing and packing for the trip. Because of her extreme allergies to certain foods, she carefully packed $200 worth of dried foods in resealable plastic bags, things like oatmeal, bran, fruits, spices, rice, barley, bouillon. She also devoured every book she could get her hands on that dealt with the area of Kenya they were traveling to, researching the cultures and economies of the people of the region.
By the time the Schillings got to Kenya, she had memorized several simple phrases of tribal dialects spoken around Bomet.
Upon their arrival, the Schillings were put up in an adequate but spartan guesthouse, and were kept so busy they had little trouble adjusting to their new surroundings. Schilling was immediately thrown into the routine of Tenwek Hospital, and Betty Schilling was put to work in the hospital`s prenatal clinic, taking blood pressures and assisting in examinations; she also did secretarial work for the hospital.
In the odd moments that they could get away, the Schillings saw what they could of the country around them. Betty, as usual, tried to strike up friendships and understanding with everybody she met, especially the tribal people they were serving, relying on her own good-humored approach to smooth over unintentional linguistic mistakes.
One day, when she and her husband were picnicking on an outing, she noticed a shy, smiling young Masai boy watching them from a distance. She motioned him over and shared her lunch with him. While they ate, she attempted a conversation through elaborate, spontaneous sign language. After the silent gesticulating lunch was over, the young boy stood and courteously told them in perfect English, ”Thanks a lot for the lunch,” before striding away, collapsing her in laughter.
For Dick Schilling, however, the mesmerizing thing was the work being done by the permanent missionary doctors at the hospital and the work he was asked to do.
”Missionary doctors, by the nature of their work, live very difficult, isolated lives year after year,” he says. ”Those with children are often split apart for months at a time, with their kids off somewhere at a boarding school.
”Most missionary hospital physicians have never been formally trained in surgery, but eventually they have to perform it, so they learn it out of necessity from books. The ones I have seen are sharp, very good procedurally and very up to date. I rate them very high, able to match up with anybody.”
A highly specialized American physician like himself, landing for the first time in a missionary hospital, is first struck by how much gets done with so few resources. Basic supplies such as bandages are washed and used over and over. Surgical instruments are old and outdated. Medicines are in short supply and carefully husbanded. Basic equipment, such as operating-room lights, sometimes are jerry-rigged affairs, like a lamp made from discarded auto headlights hooked up to a battery. More sophisticated machines, like X-rays or respirators, often are nonexistent because they are either too expensive or too sophisticated to maintain and operate in the bush.
”What we throw away in an American hospital is gold over there,”
Schilling says. ”Here we misuse what we have; there you learn to adjust and do your work with what you have. You don`t realize the staggering affluence of American medicine until you`ve been to a place like Tenwek.
”I`m a general surgeon, I don`t do Caesarian, orthopedic, prostate or kidney surgeries. But there was nobody else to do it there, so I did it. That is the unbelievable challenge of mission work. If you have basic skills, you are challenged to use talents, strengths and abilities you might never have thought you had.
”You find yourself becoming more aggressive in a situation like that, making you use your confidence. I don`t mean to say I`m a magic man. Anybody with good basic skills could do well there. It just shows how segmented we are in the medical profession in our own country. We don`t use the skills we have. ”I know it made me a much better surgeon. I figured, if the good Lord sent me this far, He was going to see me and the patient through. In two months at Tenwek and after hundreds of surgeries, I never saw an infected surgical wound. The results were fantastic.
”The chance to do good and show compassion for other people is unbelievable. And they are very grateful patients over there, so it is a joy to do the work.”
The mission hospital gave Betty Schilling her first opportunity to see Dick in action in the operating room, as he assisted another visiting physician in performing open heart surgery. She described it in one of her many detailed letters to her children back home:
These were my first surgeries to observe, along with half of the rest of the staff–everyone walking (into) surgery to take a look, standing on step stools, in plaid sport coats, muddy boots, cameras, etc. The patient waited on the veranda, standing, wrapped in her blanket while they mopped up the mud from an early a.m. emergency C-section. She (the heart patient) walked into the surgery ”theatre” and climbed upon the table, then was given pre-op
(washed and anesthetized). If one of the observers did not have a mask, they just turned up the lapel of their coat, over the nose and mouth. In the middle of opening the heart, one of the circulating nurses took off with the fly swatter to get a ”sausage” bug (large flying beetle). . . In case you are wondering, the have almost no wound infections.
Returning home to Bloomington after their two-month stint in Kenya, the Schillings began to talk between themselves about the need for simple but vital medical machines in mission hospitals. One of two patients who died at Tenwek Hospital during their stay was a man who died in surgery because there was no ventilator machine to suck bodily secretions out of his lungs during the operation. Before leaving Kenya, Schilling went to Nairobi and found one, purchased it and donated it to Tenwek. He and his wife began thinking about organizing some sort of program to acquire and distribute such machines to mission doctors.
By the time they got home from Kenya, however, one thing was clear to them. They had found the trip to Africa so spiritually rewarding that they would return to mission work as often as possible.
”When I came back from Kenya, I never opened my medical office again,”
Schilling says. ”I wanted to be free to return to the mission field whenever I was needed. We were at a perfect stage of our lives. Our children were on their own, and I had an adequate income from my oil and gas business so that I really didn`t need my professional medical practice anymore. Both Betty and I decided that as long as we were physically able, we would serve part of every year for the rest of our lives in the mission field.”
