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Two Prince George doctors send a dispatch from the world's largest civilian hospital ship

Some believe charity should be reserved for close to home. A Prince George couple is living the opposite philosophy, that all people who can help should offer themselves to all people in need.
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Larry and Sandy Hewitt left their medical professional careers in Prince George to volunteer aboard the Africa Mercy, the largest civilian hospital ship in the world.

Some believe charity should be reserved for close to home. A Prince George couple is living the opposite philosophy, that all people who can help should offer themselves to all people in need.

Sandy and Larry Hewitt are medical professionals who saw a segment on the program 60 Minutes about the Mercy Ships organization. The segment showed how impoverished communities along the coastlines of Africa would get visits from medical vessels that would pull into port loaded with doctors, nurses, dentists, specialists and practitioners of all sorts.

For months at a time, these ships are the base of operations to service the medical needs of that community, often dealing with lineups of more than 1,000 hopeful sufferers.

The largest and most famous of these boats, since the service began in the 1970s, is the Africa Mercy. It is 500 feet long, eight decks tall, and houses 450 people.

There are 82 medical beds and six operating rooms on board the Africa Mercy. Many of the staff cycle through on short stints, but many are on board for years at a time. There is a school for those raising children as they sail the benevolent seas.

"Neither of us had ever seen a volunteer organization where we work as a biomed tech and a pharmacist together," said the Hewitts in a dispatch to The Citizen from aboard the Africa Mercy.

The ship's concept only stays afloat thanks to corporate donations and other sponsorship support that pays for the surgical theatres, drug stores, medical equipment of all description and the fuel and other incidental costs to run a ship.

The personnel are there not just as an act of volunteering, but fully committed to their quest to help. Each person on board actually pays their own fare to be there.

"We raise our own fees for accommodation and food," said the Hewitts. "It is unique, but each of us feels called by God to be here and feel that He will provide through the donations of friends, family and churches. We feel privileged to serve here, where our needs are so well provided for. We have good meals and Mercy Ships tries hard to make life as easy as possible when we are living so far from home."

They miss certain elements of Canada, but mostly the loved ones still at home while they are away. But they relish the snow shoveling they don't have to do, though. And to some people in the world, coming from the land of evergreen forests and snowy mountains and log houses is the height of exotic, so the Hewitts have enjoyed having their everyday P.G. lives seen through that lens by some on the ship.

The Hewitts sold their house and resigned from their jobs to free themselves up indefinitely for the Africa Mercy. Their first deployment in November 2015 was Madagascar, the island on the southeast side of the giant land mass, and their second was Benin on the northwest side. The ship is about to set sail again, this time for Cameroon.

"We are not feeling like our work here is done yet," they said. "We are part of a vibrant community that wants to serve the people of Africa with the model of Jesus, bringing hope and healing."

The medical personnel and ship's crew are like a large extended family and they form close bonds with the people of the tidewater communities in which they drop anchor.

Many of these patients require ongoing care or multiple appointments. The transformative work done on board includes cataract surgeries that give eyesight to the vision impaired, dental surgery that allows for new levels of oral health and nutrition in desperate lives, cleft palate repairs that put distorted mouths back to functionality and one of their specialties is the extensive transformation - in health and social acceptance - for the sufferers of enormous facial tumors.

In a great many cases, according to the Mercy Ships organization, the conditions they are treating are alien to western culture, simply because they are caught early or prevented altogether but in the absence of medical infrastructure they can take hold of lives and local societies.

"It is amazing to see the difference between when a patient first arrives until they are discharged from our care," said the Hewitts. "But when those patients are young children, somehow that magnifies the impact of the healing that happens. Seeing little kids with bowed legs and club feet learning to walk again after surgery and behaving just as young children should behave, full of joy and mischief, is wonderful.

"We celebrate a lot aboard the ship as well," they added. "The African people love to sing and dance and give testimonies of what has happened in their lives, and we love to give them the opportunity to shine. In the past few months, I have been to a Celebration of Sight (for our cataract patients who were blind), a Ponseti Dance Party (for club foot babies that have been corrected using the non-surgical Ponseti method), and a Ladies' Dress Ceremony (for ladies who have had obstetric fistula repair and no longer leak urine/feces). These successful surgeries are life-changing and often bring tears to my eyes when we get to celebrate them."

Larry was 26 years into his biomed technologist career and Sandy was a 28-year veteran of pharmacy when they jumped ship a bit less than two years ago.

Larry's specialty was diagnostic imaging until he was tossed into the versatile improvisation of the Africa Mercy. Now he is well experienced in the use of patient monitors, anaesthesia units and Y.A.G. lasers for the ship's eye program.

Sandy, meanwhile, has expanded beyond community pharmacy into marshaling drugs in the hospital and active surgery settings, as well as continuing with a community practice looking after the needs of the outpatients and ship's crew complement.

They have also gained valuable leadership skills, since all on the ship must take turns making departmental decisions.

They also must teach. Part of the ship's mandate is to bolster the training and human resources in the local areas where they anchor, so more people get the healthcare help they need after the ships sails on.

"By providing training in the World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist at local hospitals all over the countries that we visit, mortality is decreased by nearly 50 per cent," they said.

The experience has also brought the couple closer together in their personal lives. They explained that Larry used to travel a week or two each month, in his landlubber career.

"Now, we eat three meals a day together and our work is literally two metres apart as the biomed shop is next door to the pharmacy.

"After a 30-second commute to work (we live on Deck 4 and the hospital is on Deck 3), we begin work at 8 a.m.

"Our lunch break is an hour and we finish work around 5 p.m. But like any job, that depends on the work that needs to be done and we sometimes work overtime, if that is possible when you are a volunteer.

"We each carry a pager for one week out of every 3 weeks on a rotation so that we are available for emergencies. Larry works with two other biomeds who are easy to work with and they make a good team."

He fixes and maintains equipment from all over the hospital, including a lot of time spent on the OR sterilizers. He sometimes works off ship at the dental clinic or eye clinic fixing their equipment as necessary.

Sandy works with two other pharmacists. One from Calgary has been on board since they arrived and another position rotates every two months, bringing in new nationalities and cultures in a cycle.

"I sometimes spend time on the wards with patients but I also spend a lot of my day ensuring that we have an adequate supply of medications for the surgeries and patients that are upcoming," Sandy said. "It takes three, four months from beginning to end to place and receive an order of medications as they are shipped by container from either the U.S.A. or the Netherlands."

They often get chances to spend personal time with local families, go see the geographic and historic points of interest in their deployment areas, and spend time on their solitary hobbies like watercolour painting and wood carving.

They keep up on the news of the world via the online connections the ship is equipped with. It is very much a home as well as a workplace and a vehicle. More than anything, it is a vehicle for change in the world. That vehicle will soon be churning the Gulf of Guinea destined for a new mission anchored in the shelter of Man-O-War Bay at the city of Douala where more Africa Mercy can be shared.