Working for.

I’ve never met a doctor like him before.

Dr. Eric. He is the missionary doctor I met who gave up a lucrative career back home in Belgium to serve the poor and needy in Mozambique, Africa. General practitioners in Belgium are highly prized and are offered huge salaries. Nonetheless, he chose to give up all of that to serve alone in a little forgotten land, far away from friends and family.

He came to serve for a year, then stayed on for another and another. He’s been there for the past 5 years, and has no intentions of returning home.

“Isn’t it hard?” I asked. Having spent some time in Africa and realizing how different the culture, food and climate must be from what he must be used to, I asked him one day.

After all, he seemed a typical European- one who was reserved and introspective instead of being typically loud and Afrikan, one who enjoyed his potatoes and cheese which are hard to come by in Mozambique, and one who enjoyed the far cooler weather compared to scorching, blazing Mozambique.

“Well,” he said nonchalantly, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.” He then smiled a broad smile.

He has no salary. He has given up a luxurious salary to live among the poor; he has said goodbye to a potentially illustrious and prestigious career in medicine to work anonymously for the needy; he even made the decision not to fundraise for himself or publicise his work because of His faith that God will provide for His needs.

Knowing how lonely it could be living alone in a foreign land after leaving one’s community and world behind, I asked, “Do you write back often to your supporters?”

“No. Not much, at least.”

“Why not?” I was puzzled. Even just living for 2 and a half weeks without easy internet access or cell phone access was a struggle for me.

“God has called me here to spend time with the people. He has called me to be with the people, to love and to care for them, to open my home to them and live with them. He has not called me here to be on Facebook all day long and to be connected to people back home for hours on end.”

That really struck me. He wanted to be 100% there for the people.

And it showed.

At 5am every morning when the sun would be blazing already, a long queue of patients would be waiting outside the clinic. Queue numbers would be given out, after which the villagers would return at 8am to see the doctor.

“We only give out 40 queue numbers every day because I believe in having quality time with each patient, so I can give them the love and care they deserve. The rest, we direct to other nearby healthcare centres, because if I had any less time per patient, my misdiagnoses would do them a greater disservice.”

a baby’s abdomen distended with parasites. He had a fever from an ear infection.

Note how malnourished his mother is.

At 6am during the children’s breakfast, he or another nurse would then look for the children with longterm illnesses to give them their medication. Some of them have recurrent fits (epilepsy), some were born with HIV, others, had longterm infections that would not go away and so needed longterm antibiotics.

I noticed, what a hit he was with the children even though he was dispensing medication to them all the time. Medicines don’t usually taste good. Why didn’t the children dread seeing him at mealtimes, day after day?

I noticed, how he hugged and kissed and played with the children, tarrying always to give a kind word or a compassionate touch. He never rushed, never was in a hurry to get somewhere else so he could have more time for himself. He was just there, 100% there, not on his i-phone or computer or hooked up onto some online chat, 100% there for the orphaned children who desperately needed some extra attention and love and care.

I will never forget the time he drove me with him to the village, where he made a special trip down just for a villager’s 7-year old child who had longterm bone infection who needed regular antibiotic injections.

“Wednesdays are errand-days, which means we close clinic but do house visits to whoever needs them. This child has a chronic infection that won’t go away and it’s a mighty far and expensive journey for his mother to walk by foot and take a bus here, so we try to visit them on Wednesdays to save them the extra trip down.”

We were a spectacle when we got there, with all the village kids screaming and shouting and giggling and forming a large audience around us as we gave the injection to the young child.

As we drove back, we talked about how back home, work instead of God would often be regarded as god, about how medicine and science so often displaces our faith from the beauty of healing, and how the Greek or Asian desire to perform and strive can so often be a hindrance to our humanity and delivery of compassion. I had so much to learn from him. He looked only a few years older than me, but was in fact, about a decade older.

I will never forget the time he held a little crying African boy in his arms. Stung by a bee, the little boy had had a terrible allergy reaction and was crying and sneezing and scratching his swollen, itchy, reddened face uncontrollably. Scooping him up in his arms, Dr. Eric hugged, kissed and held him, gently asking him for his name before instructing me to get the appropriate medications for him. He gently swayed him to sleep after the medication took effect, and carried him up the hill back to the children’s home.

Somehow, that one incident changed and touched me in a profound way. Seeing the back of Dr. Eric as he walked up the hill with the little boy in his arms gripped me in an inexplicable way.

Back home, I know how differently things would have been done. The boy would have been sat down crisply at the Emergency department, with his name tag promptly checked, and an adrenaline injection immediately administered together with a prescription of chlorpheniramine and prednisolone. It was likely that no one would have talked to him, except ask him briefly the answers to some standard questions. No hugging, kissing or holding for sure. Only sterile handrubs and an obsessive-compulsive adherence to the 5 moments of hand-hygiene for hospital auditing purposes for infection control. The boy would then have been promptly discharged and sent home.

We have become so efficient that we have lost our compassion. There is no time. Back here, why do we treat people like work.

This Tuesday, I start my first day of work as a junior doctor, also known more commonly as a House Officer.

Things, will be absolutely crazy. There will be 80 to 100-hour work weeks, sleepless nights and continuous 30-hour work shifts seeing patients non-stop, burnout emotionally and physically, work on weekends even, being accountable for the lives of many many patients and being wanted by patients, nurses, patients’ relatives and one’s seniors 24/7.

The past week of Orientation activities from 8am to 6pm daily consisting of emergency skill training and job shadowing has already left us quite undone- what will happen when work starts for real?

I am afraid.

But I remember what Dr. Eric has done, what he has told me about seeing our patients through the eyes of God, and remind myself that with human strength, loving so many people whom I may not have a deep relationship with on a daily basis would be utterly tiring and draining and terrible, but with God and His strength and compassion, all things are possible. All things are possible.

There may be the sterility of alcohol handrubs, the stress from an overwhelming workload, and burnout from an absolutely endless list of patients to see. But perhaps, I just need to remember the greater purpose behind this all- that at the end, all this is training, a discipline for our character, a test of our faithfulness, integrity and endurance.

And at the end, love conquers all. Love for His people, love for the poor and needy in and out of Singapore, and love for God.

Help me God, to love medicine and not money, to be 100% there for my patients and to love them with all my heart and soul and mind, even at 4am in the morning on an empty stomach after having worked more than 24 hours non-stop. Help me believe that all this is possible with You, because I can’t do it on my own.

“It won’t be easy, Wai Jia. I’ve been through all of that during my training. But remember, you are working for God and His strength will be enough for you.”

“Thanks Dr. Eric. I won’t forget you.”