Spending your life among women for whom nursing is a calling and a vocation definitely can influence your choice of vacations—especially if those women travel the world on volunteer medical missions.
Kicking back on a quiet beach somewhere just won’t cut it. You’re much more likely to be packing your bags for a three-week trip to someplace like Tanzania or Kenya—and several of those bags will be packed with supplies for people in need.
That’s what Christine Wade, vice president of Perioperative and Procedural Areas at UTMB, did in July. Wade comes from a long line of nurses, all of whom have brought their medical skills to some of the most remote places on earth to help people who would otherwise suffer, or even die, for lack of basic medical care that most Americans take for granted.
Those women have inspired her to do the same. Beginning her career in emergency room nursing and then becoming a nurse practitioner, Wade said there’s no career that could be more fulfilling to her.
“I grew up watching my mother doing medical volunteerism. And when I graduated from nursing school, she took me to China and then to Ecuador,” Wade said. “She’s been all over the world, and that’s why I do it as well.
Healing children in China
“My specialty is emergency room nursing,” she said. “My first trip was to China with Operation Smile, which is an organization that goes around the world repairing people’s cleft lips and palates.”
In China, Wade said, children who are considered disfigured often are abandoned or left in orphanages.
“We went to a very remote village in China, and everyone in the village had saved their money for this,” she said. “People would walk for hundreds of miles and sleep on the grass, hoping to get their child’s number chosen to have the surgery.”
The operation takes about half an hour, and patients already look so much better even in the post-operative room, Wade said.
“And they keep getting better and better after that,” she said. “Operation Smile is extremely well organized, and it’s a great one if you want to do medical mission work.”
Wade’s ER background suits her well to medical mission work; she learned how to treat patients without having needed supplies at hand and how to find solutions to problems in the moment.
“You become very thankful for the medical situation you have here in the U.S.,” she said. “In China, when we left, the nurses would go through our trash and take our gloves and wash them. They’d take our old needles and reuse them.
“You realize that what we would call trash is a windfall in other places,” she said.
Wade shared that the Operation Smile team once returned to that village in China with an equipment guide who helped locals fix their broken equipment.
“When you’re there, you’re in scrubs, and everyone knows who you are. You’re treated like a rock star, and everyone is so grateful for you,” she said. “You are so full of gratitude, and your priorities are very much in line when you do this work. I believe everyone in health care should do medical volunteer missions.”
In the thick of it
Wade also has done three medical mission trips to Ecuador with Healing the Children, where she helped treat children with urological ailments. In 2005, she worked in a shelter in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina slammed the city, and later she was part of a medical strike team in Haiti after a ruinous earthquake in 2010.
“Haiti was really scary because we were there for a few weeks and couldn’t get out,” she said. “They had no immigration or air traffic. We got out on a private plane, but we were jumped on the tarmac.
“It really gave me pause because I had small children at home, so I tried to do more scheduled medical missions instead of emergency relief,” she said.
Although Wade, her husband and their two children do go on “regular” vacations, most of the time the family finds a way to incorporate some kind of volunteer work into their trips.
Leading by example
“We were in Italy, and we did some work in an animal shelter,” she said. “There’s always a way to give some help, so there’s almost always a stop somewhere, even if it’s just for a few hours, just to do something.”
The trip to Africa that Wade took in July was mostly about pleasure travel but included a stop in orphanages in Nairobi and Tanzania, where they left plenty of gifts and supplies for the kids and workers there.
“We’ll see what connections we can make,” Wade said before she departed. “Sometimes these visits can turn into long-term relationships. Our kids have very good lives, and I wanted to make sure they could see how fortunate they are and that they need to give back because of that.
“I’m raising the kids to appreciate what they have and understand they need to help others,” Wade said.
The high point of the trip, she said–pun intended?–was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Her family already are seasoned mountaineers who have climbed Kilimanjaro before.
“Traveling is such a great experience, and we have traveled luxury and super cheap, but we have instilled in our kids the importance of seeing everything,” she said.
“We are into mountaineering. Mountain climbing is hard, but if you do it successfully, you could say, ‘If I climbed that, what else can I do?’ You start thinking you can do things that don’t seem possible, and that’s what I hope for my kids in the climb—that they realize they can do things that don’t seem possible.”
Wade said she’ll continue volunteering on medical missions until she can’t anymore.
“My mother is almost 80 years old, and she’s still doing it,” she said. “I’m trying just to keep up with her.
“This is what our family does,” she said. “If I were to win the lottery, this is what I’d do—I’d create my own nonprofit organization and do medical relief work around the world.”
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