Washington woman helps with medical clinic in Cambodia

A Washington woman spent two weeks this winter volunteering in a mobile health clinic in Cambodia. Lou Ann Miller, who has lived in Washington for the past 30 years, went on a mission trip to the Southeast Asian nation with a group called Global Health Outreach from Jan. 27 to Feb. 13.

Miller was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Illinois before moving to Washington in 1980. She has worked in the medical field her entire adult life and over the past 12 years has become involved in medical teams that travel overseas. In 2000, she went with a group of nurse practitioners and midwives to Johannesburg, South Africa. She went there to receive education in how to run rural clinics. She said she was emotionally moved by the extreme poverty she saw in the capital city.

?After I saw that, I wanted to do something to make a difference,? she said. ?We?re here on Earth for such a short time. The seeds were planted to do a mission trip but I wasn?t sure how to go about it.?

Upon returning to the United States, Miller read the book ?The Purpose Driven Life? by Rick Warren. A chapter in the book is called ?Made for a Mission,? and after reading it Miller decided that she, too, was made for a mission.

Miller looked for mission trips online and found one to Eastern Europe in 2004. She spent 10 days working at an orphanage in Ukraine through an organization called ?Heart to Heart with Ukraine.?

Miller attends Parkview Evangelical Free Church in Iowa City, and one Sunday her friend and fellow nurse Bev Herman announced she was planning a medical mission trip to Honduras. Miller went with her to Honduras in 2005. The very next year, Miller and Herman were on the move again, this time to a clinic in China. In 2010, Miller helped at another clinic in Nicaragua.

On her most recent trip this winter Miller went with a group of 20 people from nine different states. Group members included physicians, nurses, dentists, a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a pharmacist, a couple trained in doing eye exams and a medical student.

The team stayed in the city of Siem Reap, which has about 170,000 people, but all of their work was done in small villages in the surrounding countryside. Miller said that a typical day for her team was to awake at about 5 a.m. and eat breakfast at 6 a.m. The team members boarded a bus and drove for 1 ½ to two hours to the village where they would set up their mobile medical clinic. The volunteers went to eight villages in 10 days.

?We went on dirt roads to villages with thatched roofs and no electricity,? she said. ?It was night and day different from the city.?

The clinic would be open by no later than 9 a.m. and would take patients all day until 4 p.m. Miller said the clinic treated about 300 patients per day. She said it was very hard to turn patients away at the end of the day who had waited hours for a doctor visit. The team would arrive at the hotel at 6:30 p.m. in time for supper, which consisted of rice, fruits and soup. The team members were so exhausted by the end of the day that they had no trouble getting to sleep at 9 p.m.

Miller was the first person the patients saw. She took their temperature and blood pressure. The patients filled out a form which listed their two chief complaints. An interpreter would relay that information to Miller who then directed the patients to one of the rooms to treat their malady.

?Sometimes we had one big open area and we just had to share the space,? she said. ?Sometimes, the dentists and the people fitting eyeglasses were outside. We tried to give them some kind of covering because it was so hot. At times, all of us nurses were under a tree, and we kept moving our table to stay in the shade.?

The physical therapist gave away walkers to people with mobility problems. Miller said the people who received the walkers always left the clinic with a smile on their face.

?I don?t know if they had even seen a walker before,? she said.

The villagers attempted to treat some of their medical problems on their own with their own unique methods. For instance, many villages intentionally burned themselves on the part of the body that hurt because they believed the burn would make the pain go away. Miller saw people with burn marks on their foreheads who had done that to themselves trying to get rid of a headache.

One of the most remarkable things Miller saw was a man who was missing a leg and had made his own prosthesis from a car muffler. She said many people were missing legs from stepping on land mines.

Miller said that some of the people were so sick that her team could not cure them. For them, Miller said she could still share the gospel of Christ, which is something the whole group did each day before the clinic opened.

Miller said she would like to go on more mission trips, particularly to Africa.