Nurse
Specialty: Emergency Medicine
Location: Kenya
My motivation began in seed form with a desire to live cross-culturally, mediated by my love for music from around the world. This seed has taken a long time to grow into an actual opportunity. I fully believe that every believer is a missionary in their own respective place in the world, and ought to be about building the kingdom of God in some fashion.
That being said, the desire to live cross-culturally was, at some point in my career, coupled with the awareness of the deep needs that exist in under-resourced areas of the world. I have been given the opportunity to receive excellent training in nursing, grow in my practice at a level one trauma center and function as a team leader. In addition, I have sat under great biblical teaching at our home church. It is the confluence of these streams that my wife and I wish to take into our practice in Kenya.
I desire to see Kenyan nursing staff taught and trained, hospital processes built and solidified and for the name of Jesus to be lifted up in the midst of this work. In addition, I am committed to the idea that without the God of the Bible, we would have no sufficient basis for science, ethics, and beauty. This is a foundational apologetic that I wish to explore as an evangelistic tool amongst healthcare staff and patients. This is, again, very much a seed. We are committed to a five-year term at this point, but we hope, Lord willing, to be there for a lot longer.
We will be working with an established Christian hospital that has had no full-time western healthcare staff for some time. It has been under Kenyan leadership for many years. Their desire is to function as a resource and training hospital for the area. It is situated in a small rural town. As such, it serves mostly poor, underserved folks from different tribes in the area. Because this is a new team that is forming, and because they have not had full-time missionary staff for a while, our job descriptions will come about from a combination of the leadership's vision for us and how our unique backgrounds can best serve them. This will come as some mix of training, teaching and helping to develop the hospital's processes. One of our teammates is an ER physician, giving us a shared background. Emergency medicine is a growing discipline in Kenya and this is an area that we will be able to work on together.
- Higher functioning nursing staff, including the growth of emergency medicine as a specialty.
- Stable, long-standing hospital practices and processes (i.e. use of electronic records, infection control, supply use, etc).
- Discipleship of staff and students with an aim to more fully integrate Christian faith in the practice of healthcare, extended to patients and into the community.