To where could a short-term international healthcare experience ultimately take you? Please consider the inspiring lives of Mark & Angie Byler. As a medical student, Mark studied hospital medicine for a few weeks in Kenya. Later, Mark and I were on faculty together at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he met Angie and volunteered periodically in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. Mark told me, “Those people are important. And I’m going to prove it.”
In 2004 Mark and Angie did just that by moving their home, along with son Luke, to Sanyati Baptist Hospital in southern Africa. Zimbabwe, once the most prosperous nation in Africa, today is rated as having the worst quality of life of any nation on our planet. Twenty percent of the Zimbabwe’s people are HIV positive, and half of all patients admitted to Sanyati Baptist Hospital are HIV infected. In spite of these odds, Dr. Byler for the next ELEVEN YEARS served as a leader in providing HIV therapy and managing the complications of opportunistic infections associated with HIV, including profound malnutrition, tuberculosis, and PCP pneumonia.
Today Mark Byler is a faculty physician with INMED, instructing students in the International Medicine & Public Health Course. Take advantage any opportunity to become acquainted with Dr. Byler and those of his caliber for whom the world is no barrier to affirm that, indeed, all lives matter.