Hope born of incredible odds

ELCA missionaries Carolyn and Jim Brown find hope in training doctors and nurses in Cameroon.

Jim Brown’s life is full of extremes. There are days when his heart breaks, and there are days when his heart soars.

As a surgeon in Cameroon for the past two years, Jim often has felt overwhelmed.

“Only 1 percent of the world’s surgical workforce is in Africa, yet Africa has the greatest surgical burden of any part of the world,” says Jim.

But there is hope. For Jim, that comes in the opportunity to train African surgeons to practice in their home countries.

Jim and his wife, Carolyn, are missionaries of the ELCA working in Cameroon. Jim is surgical program director at Ngaoundéré Protestant Hospital, a hospital of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon. Carolyn is a recovery nurse and wound consultant.

Together Jim and Carolyn work against incredible odds to treat patients and train African doctors and nurses.

“There are millions of people in Africa who cannot get access to any surgical care, even the simplest, lifesaving treatments like C-sections or repairing hernias and open fractures,” Jim says. “These are done every day in the United States. But many people in rural Africa have no access to these kinds of care and they die or suffer because they can’t get treated.”

“We see a lot of horrible things; lots of deaths that could have been prevented with timely intervention or resources,” he says.

Even as he recites these statistics, Jim says that there are countless stories about people who got well — and shouldn’t have. “I mean this very literally,” he adds. “We see God do things that we know are so far beyond our experience and capability.”

Learning as he goes

Jim often tells people that only 20 percent of what he practiced in the United States is what he practices in Cameroon. “The other 80 percent I’m learning as we go.”

Almost everyday Jim finds himself saying, “I’ve never seen that before.” or “I’ve never done that surgery before.”

“Not infrequently I’ll literally take the book into the operating room and read about what I need to do.”

He also finds himself in dilemmas where he asks, “Can we do this and can we do this safely?”

“It takes a lot of judgment to accept the fact that nothing can be done or to give it our best try.”

Despite some of the heartbreaks, Jim finds training African doctors to become surgeons to be an energizing and life-giving experience.

“There are a lot of people alive today that wouldn’t be alive if we weren’t there,” he says.

The residents under Jim’s tutelage come from Cameroon and other parts of the African continent. He’s confident that, once trained, these new surgeons will return to their home country and make a difference.

It is important that the residents receive a very broad surgical training, because many of them may be working alone, Jim says.

“One of our greatest joys is seeing residents begin to think differently, go to the bedside and conduct a formal evaluation, think in terms of differential diagnosis and evidence-based medicine instead of doing what they saw someone else do at another hospital,” he says.

Relying on God in their work

Through their work, Jim and Carolyn have learned to rely more on God.

“There are so many times when what we do just falls apart, and we have a lot of heart-breaking things that it’s almost impossible to watch,” he says. “If you don’t believe that God is sovereign, that God is good, you could easily despair, you could easily give up. If I weren’t convinced that God has called us to do this work at this time, I couldn’t do it. It’s too hard.”

Carolyn says watching her husband struggle is difficult. “I help him, but there comes a point where I can’t do anything else but pray,” she says.

And prayer is key to their work. But a good part of what Jim and Carolyn share together is God’s love.

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now,” says Jim. “There are so many amazing, wonderful things that do happen, like establishing relationships and living and sharing with people here. It’s real.”

The Browns are not sure how long they will stay in Cameroon. “It is open-ended,” he says. “But as long as the country is stable and the program is viable and we can maintain it, we plan to stay.”