It works. I know it. I've seen it firsthand as I've been on the ground as a doctor on the Katrina-ravaged Gulf coast and as a medical missionary in Sudan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and the Congo delivering care around the world.
This is personal to me. Since 1997 I have traveled to southern Sudan on medical missions. When I first visited the region, I found a barren area decimated by a quarter century of civil war and thousands of people in desperate need of care. Samaritan’s Purse, the organization with which I was working in Sudan at that time, started a small clinic in an abandoned schoolhouse. We did surgical procedures with no running water and no electricity. Word spread quickly that Americans had appeared and were helping save lives. Trust emerged.
When I operated there the following year, I discovered a normalcy that hadn't existed in decades. People had returned to the once war-torn area and had begun to rebuild the shattered landscape to live close to the clinic. Over time as the clinic continued to grow, with a full time surgeon treating several thousand patients, churches and markets were rebuilt, and the school reopened. All this progress occurred and this community was built on the foundation of trust established by volunteer American doctors giving unselfishly of themselves to better the lives of a people without hope.
The building of a clinic, the healing, the surgery and medicine, the trust that had been reestablished by the compassion of the volunteer American doctors changed a community and is changing a war-torn country.
Today, staffed by World Medical Mission of Samaritans Purse, that hospital now treats 60,000 people a year, many of whom walk for days to be seen and treated. There is still no running water in the hospital, but there is peace built upon the compassion and generosity of Americans, the trust established through medicine and the delivery of care, and the understanding that comes from the connections and person-to-person intimacy of medicine. This trust cuts through war. It brings healing. It brings peace.
This medical diplomacy undermines the ideological support of terror. After all, people don’t go to war with those who have just saved their child. Medicine is the currency that overpowers division and hatred.
This is what I mean when I say, "Medicine is the currency for peace."
I firmly believe that this concept allows individuals to be a part of a mission larger than themselves and provides a way for America to begin to think about a long-term vision for building bridges of trust in parts of the world in need of our help and where darkness grows.
I've seen this active humanitarian philosophy bring respect and hope to communities in my own personal experiences in places like Sri Lanka just days after the Indian Ocean tsunami and New Orleans four days after the levees broke.
We should inject this concept into our formal foreign and public diplomacy. You can help me do this. Together we can change the world.
Senator Bill Frist, M.D.
Chairman