September 28, 2001
Dear Friends and Family:
You may think that we have dropped off the planet, but we’re all still on board and at the halfway point of our time away from Tenwek. Somehow it seems that we’ve been gone a long time, and still the time at home is flying by rapidly. We have some prayer requests and some updates that we’d like to share with you.
Current Activity and Our Upcoming Schedule
One of the big unknowns as we headed home from Kenya was the response I would be able to give to the most often asked question: What are you going to do during the time you’re home? I had anticipated that I would be teaching at St. Vincent Hospital in the outpatient clinic as this has been an area that has traditionally been understaffed. I was surprised to learn on my visit with the director that the position had been filled by 2 new doctors working full-time and another doctor near retirement working half-time. Returning to clinical practice was not an option because malpractice insurance is front-end loaded, and all the income for the time I would be available to work would go towards insurance. Furthermore, any job I took would have to be very flexible with the travel and meeting plans that we have during our furlough.
As we prayed for direction, I read an article about substitute teachers being needed in local schools. Many doctors [including me] suffer from the delusion that they are experts in nearly