Caribou family Africa bound Doctor to perform surgeries for women at clinic in Sierra Leone

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CARIBOU – When Dr. Josette Hunter made her final decision last summer to leave her cozy home, her well-established practice and her comfortable life in northern Maine for a war-torn country in Africa, she admitted the idea may have seemed a little crazy to others.

But, she explained in a Tuesday interview, a dream is a dream.

Hunter, her husband Doug, and their twin boys, David and Caleb, are making an incredible journey this winter from the frigid climes of Aroostook County to the burning heat of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

Sierra Leone is the poorest nation on Earth, according to the United Nations, and is recovering from a decade of civil war.

There, the couple will spend at least two years volunteering for Mercy Ships, a global charity that since 1978 has operated a fleet of hospital ships in developing countries.

The organization gathers medical personnel from around the world to perform free life-saving and life-changing operations for people in those nations.

While most volunteers for Mercy Ships sign on for a few weeks at a time and offer health care services from aboard ocean liners, the Hunters are participating in a new effort – Mercy Ships’ third land-based clinic.

The Aberdeen Clinic and Fistula Center is under construction now in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Once completed, doctors will perform corrective surgeries there for women who suffer extreme incontinence from complications in childbirth. The operation is known as vesico vaginal fistula repair, or VVF.

Doug Hunter, who has a degree in business management and accounting, will serve as the clinic’s administrator, while Josette Hunter, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology, will work as one of two surgeons at the facility.

“We feel God is calling us to it,” Josette Hunter said simply when asked why her family is making the tremendous change in their lives.

But the Hunters always felt that God had a mission for them to do. Ever since 1988, when Josette Hunter went on a mission trip to Papau New Guinea, she knew that she would do it again. She just didn’t know where or when.

When she met her husband at Gordon College in Massachusetts, they both agreed that a mission was something they’d do in their lives.

But first there was marriage in 1991, graduation in 1992, then more schooling for Josette, who became a physician in 1996. A year later, the couple’s twins were born. After that, they assumed their lifelong dream would happen after they retired.

In 2000, Hunter completed her residency and the family moved back to Doug’s hometown of Caribou where Hunter established a successful practice. Not long after that, the couple started feeling that their mission might happen sooner.

That’s when they discovered Mercy Ships, which would allow them to stay together as a family and which had started doing VVF surgeries, Hunter said.

In January 2003, while on vacation in Texas, the couple stopped in at Mercy Ships’ international operations center to express their initial interest. A year later, they called back to say they were ready to do something.

According to Hunter, it was perfect timing.

An oil company was building a hospital in Sierra Leone as part of its community outreach, but needed someone to run it. The company asked Mercy Ships if it would consider operating the land-based facility.

In the spring of 2004, the organization agreed and soon afterward the Hunters and a Texas OB-GYN, Dr. Jerry Putnam, were on board for the project.

“At times, I look at the project and get overwhelmed,” Hunter admitted. “But then I say, ‘This is God’s project.’ We feel very privileged to be a part of this.”

The surgeries doctors will perform at the Aberdeen clinic, she said, will offer women a new life.

In poor countries where advanced health care is scarce, women who have difficult child labor often experience a tear in the bladder – a complication that leaves them constantly leaking urine and sometimes feces. The smell causes such women to become social outcasts.

But a successful VVF repair allows them to return to family and village life. Hunter will travel to Ethiopia in February to receive training in VVF surgery.

“To make women feel loved and so they aren’t outcasts of society, just because they didn’t have proper obstetric care; to know you could have an influence like that on somebody is so rewarding,” Hunter said.

The clinic has a big job ahead: approximately 5,000 new cases of VVF occur annually in Sierra Leone alone.

Hunter said the clinic will start out by performing about 250 surgeries in 2005, and hopefully will increase the number to 450 surgeries each year after that. The clinic also will serve as a base for research that could reduce the likelihood of fistula formation in women.

It’s exciting, Hunter said, knowing she and her husband are doing their part to help others and make a difference in people’s lives.

Already, they are beginning their work. Doug Hunter left Jan. 1 to prepare the clinic financially for opening. He is working to locate grant money to fund the facility’s operations.

In early March, after Hunter returns from her training, she, the twins and their tutor will join him in Sierra Leone.

That, she said, is when the real adventure will begin.

“I know it may seem crazy to leave everything behind like this,” Hunter said, “but this is our lifelong dream.”

To find out more about the Hunters, or to help fund their mission, visit www.huntermissions.com.