June 7th, 2019 by Bryce Loder

The real story started in the 1960s, as I tried to read the book my brother was reading for a book report–The Night They Burned The Mountain by Dr. Tom Dooley. As a pre-adolescent on a Kansas farm before the age of the Internet and Google, my comprehension of Dr. Dooley’s work and geographic location (far away somewhere) was severely limited. I knew that I was going to be “a doctor” for sure. Even then I’m sure that I understood something about his heart for that work, and I knew I wanted to work in remote areas where there was some hardship and risk. Children and the very old were who I imagined to be the beneficiaries of this work. The song at Sunday School with the words, “…red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight…” had something to do with it. And the thought of escape from forever driving that tractor pulling a 12 foot disc around and around the field might also have been a contributing factor. In my future work as a jungle doctor there would be no time wasted breaking ice on the farm pond to give the cattle access to water. It would be all warm weather with lush green vegetation, and I’d have to learn to eat vegetables. I wasn’t sure how to work that in with my other dream of working as a doctor in my hometown in central Kansas.

Fast forward more than five decades. The “hometown doc” dream was fulfilled for thirty years, six kids passed through our house and became adults, and the risk and hardship part was met with brief periods of medical work in several countries in Latin America, in Kenya and some pediatrics study in El Salvador and Mexico. I avoided six recent winters by working in the warm New Zealand summers and sometimes in Guam. I was happy. But the books of Drs. Tom Dooley and Albert Schweitzer, along with the health care disparities I saw during decades of global travel, kept reappearing in my thoughts. When and how could I make a real difference with the skills I possessed?

Flying to Honduras this morning. More on Saturday.