Has it already been thirty years since PAACS started? Some of today’s PAACS residents weren’t even born in 1996, and for them 1996 is ancient history! Back then Archbishop Desmond Tutu was holding hearings in Pretoria to investigate apartheid-era human rights violations, and an uprising in eastern DRC backed by Rwanda and Uganda sought to oust the DRC’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. That same year Nigeria’s Olympic football team won the gold medal in Atlanta, defeating Argentina 3-2, and the Democratic Republic of Congo was called Zaire. That same year, the Christian Medical and Dental Association held its 65th Annual General Meeting in Bamako, Mali. The ratio of trained surgeons to population was one per 200,000—one-fifteenth of the ratio in the United States and Europe. So, it’s no surprise that in February of 1996, a meeting of tired missionary surgeons from hospitals around Africa, several academic surgeons from the U.S., and a CMDA representative went completely unnoticed by the world. But God was there too, and he certainly noticed!
To me it seems like yesterday when one day as I was praying to God—complaining might be a better word—and griping that He didn’t seem to be hearing my plea to send another surgeon to help me. I had prayed that prayer for two years, and God hadn’t done what I asked. But on that day as I was praying, I heard in my heart the words, “You train them, David!” My immediate reaction was that it was a ridiculous random thought, so I kept pleading with God. Almost immediately those same words came again, only more forcefully: "You train them, David!” My initial answer to God was, “How? I am already working myself to exhaustion as the only surgeon in south Gabon! How can I add that to my plate?” God didn’t answer. Eventually I began asking Him to show me how I could train surgeons, and over the next six months I realized that I already had the answer: train them exactly as I was trained over five years, including use the same textbooks and examinations, and teach them gradually in the operating room and on postoperative rounds. What would be different would be discipling my residents in God’s Word during their five years of training. Looking back on it all, I can only say, “It was God’s idea, and he made it possible!”
How do I know that? Because I was there at the Brackenhurst Conference when in faith ten or so missionary surgeons and visiting academic surgeons who were teaching at the conference bowed in prayer and asked God to help us do the impossible and establish surgical residency programs in our hospitals! At the time, none of us missionary surgeons had academic credentials, our hospitals had no funding to build housing for residents or support them, and some expressed serious doubt that any of Africa’s governments or universities would recognize or even tolerate our surgical training programs. But we had God on our side, and the sobering awareness that if we did not succeed, most of our hospitals would probably disappear within a decade or two after we grew old and retired.
Of course, we were not the only heroes in the founding of PAACS, and not the only ones who believed that God could do the impossible. The first residents to sign up to be trained for five years of their lives in our unimpressive hospitals were the first residents to volunteer! Dr. Paolo Baltazar was the first, and he was encouraged by Dr. Bob Foster, one of Africa’s best-known missionary surgeons. During his decades of service in Angola, he established not just one, but several mission hospitals, including the CEML hospital in Lubango. Dr. Stanley Quanbeck, a missionary surgeon from Madagascar who attended some of our formative PAACS meetings at the Brackenhurst Conference encouraged one of his protégés, Dr. Harison Rasamimanana, to apply to be our second resident. Both of these first graduate surgeons finished in 2002 and are still serving at Christian hospitals in their home countries. Their example of faith encouraged others to apply, and the rest, as we say, is history!
From the beginning to the present, the gracious and merciful hand of God has blessed PAACS, and on all of us who have trusted Him and served Him in obedience.
David Thompson, MD, FACS, FWACS
PAACS Founder
