Spanish translation section

Back when I was in medical school and starting my clerkships, I thought about family medicine and perhaps geographic medicine (as infectious disease medicine was called back then) as an ideal way to meld my passion for working with the underserved with travel. A rotation I pursued with the Indian Health Service illustrated a real need even here in the U.S. When I realized during my surgery clerkship that this was the field I loved, it didn’t occur to me then that I would be involved with anything globally. Global surgery at that time was in the realm of retired or missionary surgeons who worked in relative obscurity in terms of the academic and private world of the U.S. I had the privilege to obtain jobs in some very underserved communities at county hospitals, the largest of which was located within a U.S./Mexican border city, and then later in inner city Houston, which fit my passion perfectly. It wasn’t until we were living in Portland that my husband Marty (Martin Schreiber, M.D.) and I were invited to join a surgical group rotating in the mountains of Guatemala and I got my first taste of actual international surgery. It turned out that my previous experience working in underserved settings did pair well with practicing overseas; the “MacGyver” problem-solving skills I’d developed resurfaced quickly and allowed me to work with whatever equipment was available rather than demanding a special instrument! Back then, Marty and I thought it was crazy that our med school classmate Nick Gideonse, M.D., went to Haiti for medical missions. So I never would have predicted that I would be going there after the 2010 earthquake for disaster relief, nor later being a part of developing a regional medical group and bringing residents regularly to Haiti at their request. I certainly didn’t think, with the help of many friends here, that I would be trying to build a school with internet access in a remote fishing village for kids who couldn’t afford public school, nor attempt to build an educational radio station there to warn people about hurricanes and to teach that diseases were not the result of a Vodou curse. While I couldn’t build a university there, we could, with my NGO and umbrella non-profit, help sponsor higher education in Haiti for some of our volunteers there to become engineers and doctors for Haiti’s infrastructure. Global Surgery