Volunteers Have Big Impact in Small Ways
Along with the education, clinicians deliver a sense of respect to the people they treat. Burwell and Vaughn have seen the fruits of that respect in Honduras. After eight years at a location in the northern part of the country, Burwell actually ended her project there (and is preparing to scout a site in southern Honduras) because the people Peacework helped serve have arranged to bring in a government doctor and nurse each month. They have also received a grant from an organization called World Vision to help with their educational needs.
“Now, I can’t say Peacework did all of that,” Burwell says, “but we were there every year, and we convinced these people that they mattered enough for us to show up every year.”
The Good and The Sad
Participation in international medical work is, of course, more complex than just providing health education. For every heartwarming story, there is a heartbreaking one, and clinicians may come away feeling conflicted about how much good they’re doing. Segal-Gidan witnessed both extremes while in Cambodia.
The heartbreaker was the young woman in her last trimester of pregnancy with her eighth or ninth child. She appeared on the second clinic day and was diagnosed with preeclampsia. The Peacework volunteers brought in the local physician to try to convince the woman to go to the nearest hospital, which was about 10 miles away and accessible by public transportation. As Segal-Gidan discovered, the hospital may not have been geographically inaccessible, but for this patient, it was financially inaccessible; her understanding was that the patient would not have to pay for care, but there was an admission fee just to be seen at the hospital.
“I don’t remember the sum, but it wasn’t something that seemed astronomical to us—but to her it was,” she recalls. “And we could not give her the money. Financially, we could, but if we did that … we couldn’t do it for everybody. So that was really difficult.”
Vaughn has been confronted by poverty in Honduras, where she visited a community of about 70 families living in a garbage dump, in huts constructed from plastic egg crates and anything else that comes to hand. “It’s not that they can’t go to a doctor; they can, but it costs money,” she says. “The small amount of money that it costs might be a month’s salary for them. So [health care] is not going to come first. What comes first is trying to put food on the table.”
Burwell acknowledges “it can be rough” but also points out that Americans have something to learn from the quiet dignity and resourcefulness with which people in less affluent countries respond to unfortunate circumstances. “We see the end result of disease that has gone undetected and uncared for. We see congenital defects in children that will not be repaired,” she says. “But what we also see are families who take care of these unfortunate babies, caring for them with such love and in some cases such faith.”
Segal-Gidan, in fact, found some of her patients in Cambodia to be downright inspiring. In particular, there was the man with a spinal cord injury who came to the clinic in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife and children. Segal-Gidan, who works in a rehab hospital with spinal cord injury patients in the United States, was amazed by the man’s condition. He had no bedsores. He needed to be catheterized for bladder care, but his wife had taught herself how to do that and boiled the tubing that they received once or twice a year for that purpose.
“They could come and teach some people here how to be resourceful,” Segal-Gidan says. “His legs were atrophied; it clearly took a lot of effort from his family to keep him in the condition he was in. And they just did it. It was quite inspiring.”
Many Reasons to Give
Professional and spiritual rejuvenation, in addition to a desire to “do good,” are some of the reasons clinicians may want to consider medical volunteer work. For many, it’s a reminder of why they went into health care in the first place.
“I see a lot of primary care providers who are burnt out about the way medicine is practiced here in the US,” Burwell observes. “They feel up against the paperwork, up against the litigation threat, up against the greed that happens in medicine today. And they forget their original, very good reasons for becoming a doctor or a nurse or a PA.”
