Grant Recipients 2018
Project funding through Steven Roth Memorial Grant ProgramFollowing are the recipients of a grant under the Steven Roth Memorial Grant Program of Mennonite Healthcare Fellowship. For more information, see the Grant page.
Mollie Nebel
Volunteer Nursing Education in Vellore, India
Mollie Gaeddert (formerly Nebel) was awarded a grant under the Steven Roth Memorial Grant Program for a term of service from May to July 2018 at Christian Medical College (CMC) of Vellore, India. Since returning from India, Mollie has relocated from Goshen, Indiana to Atlanta, Georgia. She will be working at St. Joseph Emory University Hospital in the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit and is currently exploring opportunities for graduate school next fall. Outside of professional life, Mollie was married at the beginning of September 2018. Her husband, Lee Gaeddert, will be starting a job at the Center for Disease Control.
For more information about the Steven Roth Memorial Grant Program, including background and application forms, see the Grant Page on the MHF website.
Ruth Lehman Wiens was a first year resident in Family Medicine in Kansas when she received a Steven Roth Memorial Grant to do an international rotation October 22 to November 11, 2018 with an EMM (Eastern Mennonite Missions) sponsored hospital in Mattru Jong, Sierra Leone. Click on the section below to learn more about her experience.
More from Ruth Lehman Wiens
I was blessed with the opportunity to travel, along with my father, Tim Wiens, who is also a family medicine physician, to Sierra Leone from October to November 2018 to work with Dr. Jonathan Yoder, an Anabaptist Family Medicine physician who is at a hospital in a rural community in Mattru Jong, Sierra Leone in West Africa. The hospital serves a community of 200,000 people, and was started in the 1950s but was damaged during the civil war up until 2002. Currently there is an ongoing effort to rehabilitate the hospital including an 8 year plan with the goal to bring sustainability through water and solar projects and train local staff to take over administrative and medical duties. While working over the course of a month with the current American staff as well as the people of Sierra Leone, I gained exposure to the practice of medicine in a low resource, impoverished area, with critical need.
While in Sierra Leone, I witnessed the difficult choices that doctors in rural locations have to make, and was a part of operations I never would have had the chance to take part in in the United States. I performed c-sections, assisted with multiple other Gyn and abdominal surgeries, delivered babies that were breech and those who needed vacuum assistance, treated malaria and typhoid, and saw the devastating effects of malaria on malnourished and anemic children and women with deadly preeclampsia. We provided care for people who had no other option.
More than anything, I saw the face of God in the people of Sierra Leone. I confirmed that God is calling me to serve overseas, and I hope that this includes a return to Sierra Leone.
— Ruth Lehman Wiens
February 2019
