Medical missionaries deliver faith and health care in Africa

Written by Samuel Loewenberg

Samuel Loewenberg discusses the new attention missionaries are receiving in their role in delivering health care in Africa. He uses the example of American doctor Mark Guilzon and his family who moved to Tanzania, showing such missionaries aim to spread the gospel by example, along side setting up community health clinics.

Abstract

Missionaries have played a long-running part in the history of African health care but now they are more widespread and diverse than ever before. Samuel Loewenberg reports from Tanzania.

Mark Guilzon figured he was "living the American dream". With his wife and four children, he lived in a comfortable home in upstate New York, where he had worked for 15 years as a physician's assistant in cardiothoracic surgery. But Guilzon and his family decided to give it all up after he had what he says was a divinely inspired vision.

After months of fundraising from friends and fellow churchgoers, last year Guilzon and his family moved to Tanzania to set up a health clinic in the Rukwa Valley, an isolated and poor region of the country near Lake Tanganyika. The village where he, his wife, and children, will be living is an 18 h drive from the nearest urban centre. "The premise is that we're sent, like in Biblical times. The missionaries were sent out from their local church to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ", said Guilzon.

To see the rest of this article, please go to DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60462-1