By Edita McQuary
Santa Cruz County is a hotbed of people who do good locally and also around the globe. People from Santa Cruz County have helped educate villagers and adopted a child in Ghana, West Africa; built a school in Guatemala; and helped to support students and built wells in El Salvador. Two local pastors have even managed to travel to China and Cuba on mission trips. Recently, the community has supported a young family whose Ethiopian husband was having difficulty getting his U.S. visa to come see his wife and newborn daughter in Santa Cruz.
Dr. Sheryl Uyeda
Some months ago, I heard a very interesting talk by Dr. Sheryl Uyeda at Corralitos Comnunity Church. She has been a practicing medical missionary at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital in Papua, New Guinea, since 2017.
A Watsonville native with deep family roots in the area, Dr. Uyeda grew up on a strawberry farm off Lakeview Road, which her father took over after her grandfather died in 1976. While attending the UC San Diego, she majored in biology but explored many different options including research, teaching, veterinary medicine, dentistry and medicine. “After shadowing several professionals and working in a lab, I was praying and fasting and seeking God’s will for my life,” said Dr. Uyeda.
Ultimately, she was led by God toward medicine as “the best combination of my skills and passions, the unmet needs of the world and a way to show God’s love to hurting people,” revealed Dr. Uyeda. At the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, she attended Eastbrook Church, a very mission-focused church pastored by Dr. Marc Erickson, a retired medical missionary. Dr. Erickson and his wife, Nancy, and the local chapter of Christian Medical and Dental Association were a great influence on her decision to go into medical missionary work.
She attended short-term mission trips to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic during medical school and residency. In the third year of the five-year residency, Dr. Uyeda felt God’s call into long-term overseas missions. After considering pediatric surgery, she felt God was calling her to the general surgery field.
She applied for the Samaritan’s Purse World Medical Mission Post-residency program, which supports young doctors in their medical mission pursuit. After attending a mission conference and meeting many people who had been to Kudjip Nazarene Hospital in Papua New Guinea, she sensed that God was calling her there.
“The best things about PNG are the breathtaking natural beauty and the wonderfully hospitable people who inhabit this rugged landscape,” she said. “The hospital is located in the Highlands, about a mile above sea level in a lush, fertile valley surrounded by rain forest-covered mountains. The hardest thing to get used to is the lack of access to care here. Many patients tend to come in very late-stage disease as it can take 1-3 days to cross the rugged mountains from their homes to the hospital. Another difficulty is the limited number of resources and the rampant prevalence of violence, especially against women. It is a tribal society, thus all decisions are made by consensus which is very different from the U.S. and this takes some getting used to.”
Dr. Sheryl Uyeda (left) and Dr. Alex in the C-section ward at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital in Papua, New Guinea, the only hospital for 450,000 people in the province.
She added, “The most common surgery we do as an institution is C-sections for obstructed labor, then general surgery, such as appendectomy, bowel obstruction, infections, cancer, etc. followed by orthopedic trauma. Machetes are a very common tool for working gardens and bush houses but are also prevalent when it comes to injuries from accident or fighting. Kudjip Nazarene Hospital is a 150-bed hospital with services for adults, children, obstetrics, surgery, emergency, outpatient clinic and infectious diseases including TB and HIV programs. It is currently the acting Provincial Hospital and only hospital providing care for the estimated 450,000 population of Jiwaka Province.”
Dr. Uyeda reports this is where Papua New Guinean doctors are trained. “We currently have one general surgery trainee, Dr. Alex, who is in his third year of training,” she said. “It is a joy to be able to train more surgeons here.”
The hospital community includes about 15 expatriate households, mostly American, but also some from Fiji, Philippines, Australia, Canada and at times visitors from other nations. Although there are more than 850 local languages, the lingua franca is Tok Plsin as well as English. In her spare time, Dr. Uyeda loves to knit, crochet and explore other crafts.
Papua New Guinea is not a wealthy country and is in great need of supplies. The Corralitos Community Church women’s “Bandage Brigade” lead by retired elementary school teacher Esther Jessee has created bandages out of old cotton bedsheets and sent huge quantities of them to the hospital since 2017.
“We collect used/old (torn, stained, printed, but clean) bedsheets cut them into strips, sew the strips together and then roll them into bandage rolls,” Jessee said. “The rolls are then packed in boxes and sent to a receiving warehouse in Medford, Oregon to be shipped in containers to the Kudjip Nazarene Hospital.”
The hospital is always in need of sheets — the hospital often runs low. If you would like to support this project, call Corralitos Community church at 832-722-4363. Your donations of clean, used bedsheets will be greatly appreciated by Dr. Sheryl Uyeda, the medical team, and the patients of Kudjip Nazarene Hospital.
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Top Photo: Corralitos Community Church women with packages for newborns going to Kudjip in Papua, New Guinea, where Watsonville natïve Sheryl Uyeda is a medical missionary performing surgery.