Missionary Medical Trainees

I’m going to give a “travelogue” summary of what has happened the past week (4/16-22/17): On Monday, we started our training on how to be area medical advisers (AMAs). The Church’s program on how to document the care we provide to the missionaries is quite robust; it allows other providers of medical care to see what other providers have recommended to the same missionary…so there should be good continuity. It even allows non-medical people (like mission president’s wives, who oversee the health of the missionaries on a day-to-day basis) to document what is going on…and medical people can then read those notes.

We also learned how to find local doctors/clinics/hospitals that previous AMA’s have checked out. I was surfing on that site and even found some notes my brother, Ralph, entered in 2012 about a couple of clinics in Latvia! Cool!

We learned how to work with mission presidents to help them fulfill their responsibilities, recognizing that they have the priesthood keys and we act simply as advisers.

Elder and Sister Schwitzer (a retired ER physician and former colleague of Mike LeSueur when they both lived in Colorado Springs)[i] spoke briefly to us about the Brethren’s vision for of medical missionary work…very inspiring! It was a confirmation that the Church is led by prophesy and revelation.

Elder Weatherford T. Clayton[ii] also spoke to us. He is also a member of the Seventy and a retired physician.

At lunch on Monday, we at with our “First Contact,” a retired doctor from Utah who had previously served as AMA. If there’s a medical question I need some guidance on, I can call him. There is a cadre of medical specialists who are on call 24/7 whenever we have questions about medical conditions we are coordinating.

We also met our “In-Field Representative,” a non-medical, retired man who is a former mission president. He helps facilitate communication between the mission president, AMA, and the Brethren. Whenever a missionary comes home for medical or emotional reasons (about 6% of the missionaries who serve), a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles[iii] always has the final decision.

We had a presentation on how to teach the missionaries to be safe. It was very enlightening to hear some of the causes of missionary injuries. Elder Schwitzer reminded us that some of these missionaries are “only 6 years out of Primary[iv],” so we can’t be too surprised when they sometimes make impulsive and foolish decisions. We learned about disease prevention.

We learned about common orthopedic, dental, eye and mental health complaints.

We learned about how to coordinate payment of care the missionaries received.

They shared with us some of the ways other couples have magnified their callings as AMA’s throughout the world…in addition to their “official” responsibilities (helping orphanages, teaching English, etc). Some of those are very inspirational; I jotted down some ideas of what we might do while we’re in Peru.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we had dinner with some old and new friends; what a blessing so many people have been in our lives!

On Thursday evening, we ate dinner in the hotel and started preparing for our trip. We caught a shuttle to the SLC airport Friday morning; our driver was from Peru! We had two extra suitcases, which cost us $200 each! Each one weighed 50#, so that’s $4/pound. However, I think it was worth it, because if we pay someone else to bring things down, it will cost us $8/pound. Things went smoothly in the airport. We sat by a nice young lady from Atlanta who now lives in Reno, but is engaged to someone who lives in Atlanta, so will be moving home. She flies home every two weeks. Things went smoothly in Atlanta airport, also. We were on a 767, which has 2 seats on each side and 3 in the middle. They fed us a nice meal at the beginning of the 3.5-hour flight and a snack at the end. I watched Moana. I had watched it previously, but didn’t understand a lot of the dialog; I watched it with subtitles this time and got a lot more out of it. I think that’s going to be essential for me, given my hearing loss! I also watched a TV show about a lady who travels to exotic places. This time she traveled to Iquitos, Peru, the largest city not reachable by road; it’s only reached by plane or boat (up the Amazon River). It was started by European “rubber barons” when rubber trees first started being harvested in the late 1800’s/early 1900s for all the automobiles that needed tires. At that time, the Europeans didn’t want their laundry washed with the dirty Amazon water, so they sent their dirty laundry back to Europe! Wow! There are some very ornate buildings from that era built by those Europeans; there was A LOT of money from that industry at that time! Eventually, the rubber industry was moved to Malaysia, where it was more practical/accessible than having to travel up the Amazon; after that, Iquitos was no longer the “rubber capital” of the world.

I also read a booklet about Cuzco and Machu Picchu, part of a travel guide to Peru. I did some sudoku. We landed at about 11:30. We went through customs and immigration smoothly. The other AMA here (and his wife) picked us up at the airport. We returned in a van/taxi; we live on the other side of Lima, so it took about an hour to get home. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic over parts of our trip, even at midnight!

[i] https://www.lds.org/church/leader/gregory-a-schwitzer?lang=eng

[ii] https://www.lds.org/church/leader/weatherford-t-clayton?lang=eng

[iii] https://www.lds.org/church/leaders/quorum-of-the-twelve-apostles?lang=eng

[iv] https://www.lds.org/topics/primary?lang=eng&old=true