Medical missions offer memorable experiences unmatched by any other travels . While much service is given on missions , even more rewards are returned to participants by insights gained and perspectives broadened . Thus , these experiences uniformly become profoundly inspiring to participants and their families .
Over the past four decades , mission engagements by our family brought us deeper understanding of other cultures ; insights into the effects of disease , poverty and political failures on human life ; opportunities to participate in meaningful changes and reinforcement of humanitarian service as a core family value . Missions also gave us close witness to historic social transitions , including in China just after the Cultural Revolution of Mao , and in Russia and Eastern Europe just after the break-up of the Soviet Empire . We worked in Vietnam after the long , mutually destructive war , and in Afghanistan amidst fierce internal conflicts and serial wars . Now , mission support of Ukraine through SOS ( Louisville-based Supplies Over Seas ) gives us chilling insights into the horrific consequences of the Russian invasion . These missions and mission support brought to our family meaningful perspectives on major world events of our time , as well as the often-tragic human consequences created .
TRAVELS AROUND THE WORLD
Medical Missions : Travel Ventures that Bring Exceptional Rewards
by GORDON R . TOBIN , MD & ELISABETH P . TOBIN , PHD
long-closed society . We then focused on Guatemala . While in their mid-teens , our now-grown children , Christopher and Anne-Elise , benefited greatly from participating in these Guatemala missions . Seeing the extreme poverty and suffering gave perspective to their safe and comfortable lives here . Especially memorable was an emergency evacuation of a newborn who was severely burned one day after delivery . She was rushed by air to Louisville ’ s Children ’ s Hospital Burn Unit , where I managed her care , skin grafting and aftercare ( Fig . 1 ). Her story was later featured on Dateline NBC : Saving Stephanie . Also memorable were visits to the remote clinics in mountains and jungles and visiting the enormous garbage dump of Guatemala City , where hundreds of families permanently live and forage for food and shelter ( Fig 2 .). These experiences brought our family profound gratitude for the blessings of living in the U . S .
Fig . 1 : Anne-Elise Tobin ( R ) holding a newborn who was badly burned the day after delivery in Guatemala and flown to Children ’ s Hospital for burn care and grafting by Dr . Tobin . Mission leader , Judy Schwank , RN , of Bowling Green , is beside them .
China and Guatemala Missions of the 1980s
In the early 1980s , our initial missions were to China , which gave us the opportunity to be among the first Americans to see that
Fig . 2 : The Guatemala City garbage dump , where hundreds of desperately poor families permanently live and forage .
Vietnam Missions of the 1990s
The 1990s brought missions to Russia and Romania just after the break-up of the Soviet Empire and witness to the joy and relief that resulted . Our major focus of that decade , however , was to postwar Vietnam . In 1989 , a U . S . government sponsored trip to Hanoi with Operation Smile introduced me to the very primitive state and high mortality of burn care there . I had been an early adopter of the “ early tangential excision and grafting ” technique , which I introduced to our Norton Children ’ s Hospital Burn Unit in 1977 , and which was showing substantial reduction in burn mortality and morbidity . Teaching this surgical technique and the substantial skills of the University of Louisville Surgery Burn Unit by our multidisciplinary team became the basis of a decade-long burn education program , with biannual missions by our team ( Fig . 3 ). We gave symposia of lectures and demonstrations in the major hospital burn units of
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