On Saturday, March 9, the ECC Executive Board unanimously approved the nomination of Dr. Eric Gunnoe to the PCP Board of Directors. Welcome to the PCP Board, Eric! Below is a brief biography, written by Eric.
I grew up in southern West Virginia. Thanks to the prayers and patience of my Aunt Gladys I became a believer at age 12 years. She supported my desire to become a physician and suggested that I consider long term medical missions. Though I doubt that she had read the biography that she gave me—that of a Christian missionary doctor in Bangladesh—the scene of him defending his village certainly piqued my interest in this career.
My good intentions would not have been enough to get me into and through the rigors of medical training, so I give all the credit to God. I can see now that God blessed me not for my personal ambition but for His purposes. As I did my training in pediatrics and then in pediatric critical care, I often prayed for God to use me to serve the kids who had nothing. However, my first Christian medical mission trip to Papua New Guinea, where I cared for kids with cerebral malaria, typhoid fever, and bacterial meningitis, tempered my enthusiasm for medical missions due to the risk of exposing my own children to these often lethal diseases.
In 1995 my wife Nancy and our two daughters and I moved to Portland, Maine where I took a job working in pediatric critical care at Maine Medical Center. When the girls left for college I resumed my exploration of medical missions. I staffed several short-term Christian medical missions teams to Honduras. However, the shortcomings of this traditional short-term model were apparent to me. If a team simply visits an area and directly delivers medical care then they have done nothing to advance the local healthcare system. I suspected that secular medical NGOs better attended to healthcare system development than the teams that I had staffed, so I joined a team from New England that assisted the Haitian government referral hospital following the devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Once again, I was disappointed by the limited benefit of Western healthcare providers directly rendering medical care in poorly developed healthcare systems.
Shortly after I retuned from Haiti I contacted Byron Miller, the director of Paul Carlson Partnership. Based upon my perusal of the PCP’s website, I thought that the organization was a large NGO. When I suggested to Byron that we could do better by training Congolese providers he quickly agreed, likely because I later learned that I was his first medical volunteer. He was just glad to have some help. Within a year, God brought us several more medical volunteers, each of whom was excited about this model of training trainers who would then train the remaining staff in the CEUM’s healthcare system.
Like every other volunteer, board member, and staff of the PCP, I sincerely believe the words of Ephesians 2:10, which say, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do”. Though I’m occasionally inclined to be overwhelmed by the scope of the suffering in northwest DR Congo, I’m reminded that God prepared these good works for us to do in advance. We are not alone; Jesus wants this to work at least as much as we do.
Dr. Eric Gunnoe
