Montpelier doctor makes a far-flung housecall
Thanks to effort by Moretown nonprofit, Dr. Carol Vassar spent a week treating people in Kenya
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Ruth Young, holding baby, chats at the school built by Moretown-based Kids in Kenya, which seeks to help impoverished children. In December it brought a medical mission to the village of Lanet where the school is, joined by Montpelier physician Carol Vassar and other medical personnel. Submitted photo |
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By Andrew Nemethy Times Argus Staff - Published: February 1, 2010
A doctor's visit usually ends with a prescription, some further tests or if we're lucky, a clean bill of health.
When Dr. Carol Vassar saw patient Ruth Young of Moretown last September, the outcome was decidedly different: A trip all the way across the Atlantic ocean in December to Kenya, where Vassar found herself spending a week seeing patients in a setting vastly dissimilar from her cozy medical practice on Main Street in the state capital.
There were orphans whose parents had died of AIDs, patients with goiters, wounds, pneumonia, possible tuberculosis, infections, and other ailments less common than she would see as a single practitioner in the state capital for 20 years.
There were also memorable vistas, a stunning array of flowers and colorful birds, and close-up views of elephants and giraffes, all cached in hundreds of megabytes of video and pictures that Dr. Vassar collected in her busy week in the village of Lanet Umoja, 12 miles from the country's fourth largest city, Nakuru.
Vassar's trip was equal parts serendipity and purpose. Young is the executive director of a nonprofit organization called "Everyone's Child," which is dedicated to helping underprivileged children by building schools, providing food and developing sustainable support. One of its main efforts is called "Kids in Kenya," a program set up in 1997 in a country where AIDS has devastated families and left many orphans. The program is an outgrowth of a missionary effort by Young's Church of the Crucified One in Moretown to build primary schools in Kenya. While started by the church, the program now encompasses people of faith not connected to the church, and is supported by donations and grants.
Vassar, who loves travel, has long sought out opportunities to volunteer her skills to those less fortunate around the world, beginning with a trip to Egyptian villages to provide care when she was in Eastern Virginia Medical School, and to India in her residency.
When Young came to her appointment in early fall, at the end she screwed up her courage and asked, "Carol, have you ever considered going to a medical mission in Kenya?" "She literally put her pen down and said, 'How soon can I go,'" Young recalls.
The answer turned out to be Dec, 3, when Dr. Vassar and 11 others, including Young, another physician, some nurses and educators and a videographer left on the long multi-leg 13-hour flight to Nairobi, Kenya and then the drive to Lanet.
For Dr. Vassar, the trip meshed perfectly with her desire to help those in impoverished areas and explore other cultures.
"I've wanted to do this since I first went into medical school," says Vassar, who donated $2,000 to Kids in Kenya to pay for her air fare. "You get to help the people who are most in need. People everywhere need health care, but they have the least access to it," she says.
The group stayed at a hotel in Nakuru and was driven to Lanet each day, seeing patients at the school built under the auspices of "Kids in Kenya," which now educates arounds 1,000 children. The Kenyan government, which is trying to be proactive with the AIDS epidemic, sent public health workers to the clinic to test for AIDS and provided free medicines and helped organize the clinic, which saw over 1,000 people in a week.
"The village reminded me of poor villages in India," Vassar says, with rough dirt roads, houses made of mud and dung, and no electricity. Because of a drought, the mosquitoes and malaria she expected to encounter weren't present, nor was typhoid fever, and the temperatures were pleasant, never higher than the 80s. However the drought, Vassar says, has exacerbated the prevalence of hunger, especially in the children, and she was moved by the depth of the poverty she saw.
For Young, it was her third trip to Lanet. An education major at UVM, she made her first visit to do a study while getting her doctorate in 1997, and got sidetracked by the experience, finding an outlet for both her Christian principles and academic interests and expertise.
The Lanet school, completed in 1999, has evolved a landmark program that now has been adopted by the Kenyan government, Young says. The idea became the motto of the organization, "Everyone's child."
"Everybody knows an orphaned child doesn't stand a chance," she says, noting that in a poor country families have all they can do to take care of their own children. When teachers at the Lanet school found some of the orphan children fainting from hunger in classes, they put their heads together to figure out a way to help them and came up with the idea to ask people to "take something extra" and donate it to the orphans. The villagers generously gave food and toys, shoes and clothing to the orphans, recognizing that children with no parents had to be "everyone's child."
"It was so humbling because these are people who have nothing and they're still reaching into their pockets," says Young, who is now organizing another medical mission next December to return to Kenya.
Vassar found the Kenyans to be open and respectful of her as a female doctor, and she hopes to be able to go again next December, despite a reminder that life in Kenya is not totally risk-free. "The second morning we got up to discover there was no breakfast because the hotel had been robbed overnight," she says. The female receptionist had been murdered, and the three armed guards at the hotel had vanished.
Aside from that harsh moment, she says "the Kenyans I met just seemed like people from anywhere. They were all very nice."
"The people are incredible, they get into your skin, they're wonderful people," agrees Young.
Young has considerable pride that an idea that was born in Moretown has taken hold and resulted in three schools being built serving 2,000 children in Kenya. Everyone's Child now also hopes to expand to help orphans in India, Jamaica and Brazil as well.
What she has seen abroad of the daily hardships others face has provided her with perspective on how blessed she is to live in the comfort and beauty of Vermont.
When I'm having a bad day, I sort of shake myself and say wait a minute," she reflects.
The mother of a young son, she is acutely aware from her travels how fortunate children here are compared to the orphans in Kenya.
"They have seen things in their lives that I hope my son will never see," she says.
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For more information about "Everyone's Child," log on to everyoneschild.net. An informational dinner and fundraiser for the organization's next medical clinic will be held March 11 from 6-8 p.m. at Central Vermont Hospital, with Dr. Vassar on hand to talk about her trip.
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