An African missionary's year in the US ends

One of my heroes, Dr. Barbara Nagy, returned to Morganton from Malawi in central Africa in the summer of 2009. She and her three daughters came for a year of respite from her medical practice at Nkoma Hospital.
Since 2004, she’s treated patients there suffering from malaria, meningitis, tuberculosis, malnutrition and AIDS. She and I are both members of First Presbyterian Church in Morganton.
Her family needed housing, child care, yard tools, meals and transportation, among other help, and a passel of Presbyterians pitched in to assist.
A year in the USA brought piano lessons, CoMMA shows and memorable times with friends and family.
Melia, 16, attended Patton High School and Anna, 12, went to Walter Johnson Middle School.
Nagy’s youngest daughter, Happiness, 5, was a pre-K student at Creative Beginnings.
Nagy began a speaking schedule of visiting five to seven Presbyterian churches a week along the East Coast.
One winter evening, I babysat for the well-behaved girls joining them at the dinner table. We ate lasagna their mother prepared before she left for a church meeting. The conversation became raucous and filled with laughter. All of us were having fun, but I thought it was time to quiet them and said, “We should calm down. We sound like a bunch of hyenas.”
The girls giggled and informed me, “No! That’s not what hyenas sound like!” And they proceeded to yelp and growl in a correct imitation of the animals which are a routine part of their African existence.
A major difference for the girls while in Africa is their education. Nagy says the schools in Malawi do their best with limited resources, but they teach by rote memorization, and students are discouraged from asking questions. She feels it’s in her daughters’ best interests to receive stronger academic learning provided by an American boarding school in Kenya.
A few weeks ago, I cheerfully asked Melia how she liked the new boarding school she had attended during her last year in Africa, not realizing how difficult it might be for a young girl to be separated from her family. The polite and thoughtful girl sat silent and expressionless. Her good school is two countries away, a 2 ½ to 5 hour plane trip from her mother and sisters in Malawi. I felt bad that my question distressed her.
Finally Melia said she likes her teachers there.
Anna, starting eighth grade, will be joining her older sister this year in Kenya for school. Happiness will stay in Nkoma and have her education supplemented with a home-school curriculum from the US.
One of Nagy’s major concerns for Malawi residents is malaria. She explained that the pesticide DDT eradicated malaria-carrying insects in the USA by 1951, and also rid the Caribbean and parts of Southeast Asia of the disease. She said in Malawi, “Everyone gets malaria several times a year. If a person is impoverished, young and stressed by poor health and malnutrition, the person often dies.”
Nagy said it would be difficult to eliminate malaria from tropical Africa where standing water is found in all seasons of the year, but indoor residual spraying with safe, long-lasting insecticides could help make the disease rare, a course of action she promotes.
Why does Barbara Nagy continue to want to live and practice medicine in Africa?
As her year in the US drew to a close, she said, “God loves people everywhere. He calls us to help them in their different circumstances. When all the doctors are in one country and all the sick in another, some of them need to move.
“The sub-Saharan health systems are essentially functioning without doctors. You can’t just leave huge groups of people without care.”
She asked me, “What would you do?”
When Dr. Nagy meets with her staff on Monday mornings at Nkoma Hospital to decide how best to help their patients, how to portion out their limited penicillin, quinine and other resources, she is comforted knowing many people are offering intentional prayers for her and the staff.
More information about Nagy’s mission can be found at:
http://gamc.pcusa.org/ministries/missionconnections/nagy-barbara/
Gwen Veazey’s speculative fiction story, “Music of a Family Man,” appears in the July issue of A Fly in Amber: http://www.aflyinamber.net/?p909