Editor’s Note: We do not maintain a separate section for ‘Letters To The Editor’. However, we do invite such and may publish them among the regular articles in our Opinion and Commentary Section, such as the one below.

When I read the article about “Short term Missionaries vs. Vacationary” I had mixed feelings. It was well into the article before the author indicated that it was alright for a church to send doctors to a disaster area. What about the physicians who go on short term missionary trips to a mission hospital when there is no disaster?

I think the author is overly critical about this subject. I am a retired orthopedic surgeon and my wife is a retired anesthesiologist. Between 1998 and 2002, we made five trips to the Kijabe Medical Center in Kenya. I performed orthopedic surgery on Kenyan patients on all five of those trips and had I not been there these patients would not have received the surgery. My wife practiced her specialty on the first two of our trips.

We paid our own way, as do most physicians who go on these trips. There were no Kenyan surgeons that could do the operations and there was a full time missionary orthopedic surgeon there on two or three of the trips so the short term missionary physicians who go to Kijabe go because there is a need.

I would agree with the criticism of a group going and only completing have of a project rather than the whole project. I would also agree that it would be better for a church to send money so that local workers could do the project. Only if the skills are not available should “short term missionary” groups go to a mission site and do a project.

John W. Thompson is a semi-retired orthopedic surgeon living in Lake Oswego, OR. He attends The Community of Faith Lutheran Church