“When the end comes for you, let it find you climbing new mountains, not sliding down old ones,” said Les Brown, a motivational speaker. Surgicorps International allowed me to climb my new mountain—Zambia.
Getting there wasn’t easy. There were two long flights and a layover that stretched into the night by the time I reached Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city. By then, I’d lost track of how many time zones and how many hours of sleep I’d left behind. And I knew the trip home would be just as grueling. But somewhere between the exhausted travel the first morning at Beit CURE Hospital, all faded into the background. I realized this was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I volunteer with Surgicorps International, an organization that’s sent surgical teams into underserved communities around the world for decades, and, honestly, the more trips I take with them, the more impressed I am with their operation. Surgicorps doesn’t just show up and leave—they build relationships with local hospitals like Beit CURE, they bring the right people and the right equipment, and they run these missions with a level of care and organization that makes it possible for volunteers like me to actually focus on patients instead of logistics. As a CRNA, that matters. I need to trust the team around me, and Surgicorps has never given me a reason not to.
What keeps me going through those long hours is the team. There’s a camaraderie on these trips that’s hard to find anywhere else. Surgeons, nurses, techs, and anesthetists from all over, thrown together on the hospital campus, all leaning on each other to get through each day. We share meals, swap stories, laugh way too hard at things that probably aren’t that funny, and pick each other up when the work gets heavy. By the end of the week, strangers on the first flight feel like family.
There’s also something undeniably adventurous about all of this: the waking up somewhere totally unfamiliar, adapting to a healthcare system that looks nothing like the one back home, and figuring out things on the fly. Regular life doesn’t scratch that kind of itch in me.
Here I feel more alive, more useful, more living in the present than I do at home.
But beneath the exhaustion and the adventure, this trip is really about giving something of myself. Patients travel long distances, sometimes from far outside the city, just for a chance at surgery they’d otherwise never receive at a Beit CURE Hospital. Being able to give them safe anesthesia care, watching over them at their most vulnerable moments, is a privilege I don’t take lightly. It does cost me sleep, comfort, and time away from home, but it definitely gives me back so much more.
There were many highlights to this mission trip, such as dinner at the Peacock Hotel, and the daily Zambia lunches, which were shared by the whole team and cooked by the kitchen staff, the dancing and singing at the patients’ celebration, Jack Demos’ accolades (which made my heart cry with joy), but the Beit CURE Hospital campus and its parklike milieu, which, in itself, created a healing environment for the mothers and children recuperating from surgery, was definitely over the top for me. Isolated from traffic noise and hearing instead the constant laughter of children playing brought smiles to my face.
So, even as I make the long trip home, tired and ready for my own bed, I already know I’ll be back.”
