Africa needs doctors, and in 1997, Tracy and Patty Goen were Christian physicians ready to respond to the need as medical missionaries. But like most medical school graduates, the couple was saddled with student debt. Together they owed $100,000.
Mission agencies, however, insist that candidates be debt free before sending them into the field. For the Goens, that would mean a five-year delay to work and repay the money before they could move to Africa.
That is, unless somebody paid their debt.
Enter David Topazian, a missionary and retired oral and maxillofacial surgeon on Yale University’s medical school faculty. He knew that if doctors such as the Goens had to go into private practice to repay their debts, chances are they would get settled into comfortable lifestyles and never make it to places that desperately need them.
So in 1994 he and Daniel Fountain founded Project MedSend. The next year, MedSend made Nepal-bound missionary physician Martha Carlough its first grant recipient. In 1997, MedSend accepted the Goens.
The deal: Project MedSend would partner with a mission agency — in the Goens’ case, the South Carolina-based evangelical SIM International — and take over their monthly student loan payments for as long as they remained in the field, potentially adding years of service to a missionary’s career.
MedSend has given grants to 185 other physicians, nurses, dentists, physician assistants and other health professionals, each of whom serves under the authority of one of 49 mission boards that now collaborate with MedSend.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB) is one of the mission boards with whom MedSend identifies.
Care lacking worldwide
“A lot of medical school graduates that feel called by God to do missions have a hard time obeying that call,” IMB spokesman Mark Kelly said. “Project MedSend makes a wonderful contribution to helping them have the freedom to answer that call.”
Half of the world’s people have no access to health care, yet dozens of church and mission hospitals have closed in India and Africa in part because of a lack of medical professionals to staff them. Diseases once thought to be virtually eradicated, such as tuberculosis, are on the rise. AIDS has killed 20 million people, and experts note that the worst of its death toll has yet to come.
Topazian, who has served as president of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA), said that the association’s missionary members took note of the crisis in the missions field.
“We started receiving reports from missionaries in the field who were overworked, who were due for furlough and couldn’t come home on home assignment because there was no place for them,” Topazian said. The rising costs of health education and the need to pay that off before going to the missions field were shrinking the replacement pool.
The association asked Topazian to look into the issue. He surveyed mission boards with health ministries, hospitals or health-development ministries. From the 33 mission boards that answered the survey, Topazian learned that 49 physicians were partly through the candidate process but had been told to go to work off their debt and then return.
Meanwhile, 30 clinics and hospitals represented in that group of missions had no health professional in charge. With these facts in mind, Topazian and some CMDA members laid the groundwork for Project MedSend.
MedSend isn’t a sending agency, but rather partners with Christian ministries that send medical professionals. After a ministry pays MedSend a one-time participation fee, MedSend looks at the candidate’s qualifications and financial situation. Medsend assumes the debts for as long as they’re in the field. The average grant is $30,000, but grants for physicians can be more than $100,000. Most doctors are Christian doctors. (RNS)
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