At the conclusion of every trip I always declare that it was a "great trip."  That is because it always is.  But one thing I never say is that it was the "best trip."

That is until Campbell's trip to Haiti this past March 4-11.  

By now we are all familiar with the problems facing Haiti and they were only exasperated by the earthquake that the nation experienced last October.  And so, when our teams arrived, we did much of what we had done before the only difference was that the destruction around us was much more pronounced.  The desperation much more clearly felt.  Each day we saw hundreds of patients and they all received the best that we had to offer.  We can even say that two lives were saved this time around.  One, an elderly man who was carried into the clinic by his son because he was unresponsive.  Our doctors and students quickly discerned that he had become septic due to an infection.  He was attended to and connected to IVs which brought him back to lucidity.  Being then transported to a hospital all agreed that he would have likely died that day or the next had we not been there to treat him.  The second was an infant whose mother brought her in because she was lethargic.  Pneumonia was the culprit this time and, again, all agreed that, had the mother not brought her in, the baby would not have survived much longer.

As great as these stories are, they are not what made this trip the best.  Prayer is what did it.

Some of you may not know that there has been a recent push in the medical community to finally take decades worth of studies seriously and to begin to instruct medical students on the need for them to be aware of their patients needs not just physically but spiritually as well.  Campbell had already been cognizant of this need and has been instructing our students on how to ask patients about their spiritual needs and support structures (church, faith-based groups, community fellowships, etc.) since the beginning.  This doesn't make it any less uncomfortable for some of our students who have been taught all their lives that it is okay to talk to someone about anything other than politics and religion.  Those are the two taboo subjects. We try our best, however, to get them to see that such a conversation can be done sensitively and respectfully and the patient will benefit from it in the end.

We had some help on this trip in this endeavor by a resident doctor who came to help our students learn the ropes.  The night before our first clinics, he shared with the whole team about how the previous week he had to share with a 36 year-old wife and mother of 4 that she had only two to six months to live.  He described the scene of family and friends gathered around her responding in a mixture of grief and anger.  In the midst of this, he asked them all if he could pray for them.  They agreed and what he described afterwards was a room that now had a sense of peace and, even, joy.  He told a few more related stories and then challenged our students to pray for the patients that they would soon see in their clinics.  And they did.

Each day hundreds of patients were seen and hundreds of prayers were prayed.  Each evening stories were shared among the students of how they challenged themselves to take the doctor's advice and how they were so glad that they did.  The last night of our time in Haiti, we all gathered together and shared what this trip meant to each one of us.  And time after time students would say, often through tears,  "I had never prayed with a patient before and I was nervous to do so.  But I challenged myself to try it.  I had no idea how much it would mean to them that I did and I cannot imagine doing medicine without  prayer playing a role in my practice."  

The old adage is true "Prayer changes things."  In this case prayer changed the doctors as much as it did the patients.  And it changed the overall experience of this trip.  It was, indeed, the best.  But I now expect many more "bests" to come.