Before you read this, let me do a "personal status" report. We were able to talk with Dr. Gary Parker our first day back on the ship last summer (he left for the summer shortly thereafter) and he and Matt stood back to back with Gary still coming out taller. Ali was already home on maternity leave when we arrived, but her husband Phil lived just two doors down. We were able to share some meals with him and he carried our suitcases up the stairs when we left to return home.
Few have changed the lives of people the way
the volunteers on the Africa Mercy have. Serving aboard the world's
largest civilian hospital ship, they have restored sight to thousands of
people suffering from cataracts and returned smiles to victims of
facial tumors and cleft palates whose deformities made them social
outcasts. Scott Pelley goes to Togo on Africa's West Coast to report on
the Africa Mercy ship's patients and the dedicated doctors and nurses
who have made the ship and its mission a way of life. Pelley's report
will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Feb. 17 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT.
The
Africa Mercy spent five months docked in Togo, where its staff removed
281 tumors, repaired 34 cleft palates and restored sight to 794 cataract
patients who had been blind, some for decades. Maxillofacial surgeon
Dr. Gary Parker left his native California and UCLA where he trained and
volunteered for what he thought might be a temporary assignment
removing facial tumors and performing other procedures on Third World
patients. That was 26 years ago. He has since married his wife, whom he
met onboard, and raised two children on the ship, all along transforming
the lives of people, some of whom could literally not show their faces
in the light of day.
"These are people that go out at
night and they forage for food and then, in the day, they hide," Parker
tells Pelley, about those horribly deformed by benign facial tumors.
"They can't go to market...school. They are isolated."
To
nurse Ali Chandra of New Jersey, the work they do helps to humanize
those deemed inhuman through no fault of their own, whose maladies are
often blamed on curses or evil spirits. Asked by Pelley what she would
say to those in her profession who would be unable to work with such
disfigured people, she answers, "People have been saying that to these
people their whole lives and someone has to look them in the eye and
tell them 'you're human and I recognize that in you.'"
A
four-year veteran, Chandra also met her spouse onboard -- a fairly
common scenario that has earned the ship another name, "the Love Boat"
-- and plans to stay awhile, perhaps, like Parker, raising her family
onboard, sending them to the ship's school and vacationing periodically
in the U.S.
She is quite content with her life. "I miss
strawberries and I miss fresh milk and I miss my family -- not in that
order," she tells Pelley. "You have no idea how awesome this life is. I
get to see the world...take care of incredible people. Why would you
want to live in a house on land? This is way more fun," says Chandra.
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