For a week at a time, three local physicians practice medicine in locales immensely different from Pennsylvania. Drought-challenged southern India. Volcanic villages in Ecuador. Fishing towns in Ghana. Would you?

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Have Black Bag, Will Travel
You spend all day helping people. Conducting exams, making rounds, doing surgery. You’re on call for emergencies on nights, weekends, holidays. And when you take time off, you…what? Do more of this?
Wouldn’t you want to stick your toes in the sand or snowboard down a wintry slope? For some doctors, the pull to share their gift is so strong that they get away from it all in a very different sense.
Dr. Marsha Bornt of Apple Hill Gynecology in York has taken over 60 trips to developing countries on three different continents. She’s traveled with NATO, Rotary Club, Living Word Community Church, Impact India and others. Along the way, she’s dealt with a lot: the aftermath of an earthquake and a cholera outbreak in Haiti, life-threatening children’s burns in Bolivia, women with procidentia (severely prolapsed uteruses) in India.
What stood out to Dr. Bornt when she first arrived in India was the medical situation. “They were still dealing with leprosy, rabies, polio, TB,” she recalls. “It was like the US in the 1800s, before antibiotics.” There was also no hospital near the orphanage where they were working.
Ophthalmologist David Silbert of Conestoga Eye in Lancaster traveled to Honduras six times, until the State Department issued a warning because of the murder rate—the highest in the world. He began partnering with a nonprofit already working in Ecuador; he’s now planning his sixth trip there.
He and his team screen classrooms full of children for vision problems. Like, 1,200 of them. In one week. “Our team is disappointed if we don’t see 250 kids a day,” says Dr. Silbert. Some of these kids walk four miles to be seen. Typically a few need surgery; others need glasses. This year, the team gave out about 120 pairs of glasses, plus one. Dr. Silbert recalls, “This one boy kept hanging around. It was clear he wanted glasses in the worst way, but he didn’t need them at all. We realized he’d be crushed if we didn’t give any, so we gave him a pair with just glass in them.”
Seth Quartey, of Maryland grew up in Ghana and still has family there. He came to the US for medical school years ago; he’s an infectious disease physician at Wellspan in York. He chose his specialty because it would be useful in Ghana, too. Every year for the past 11 years, he’s gone back to perform surgeries. But it’s not just patients who are helped; it’s also hospital staff. “We have a lot of medical skills in the US along with the latest advances. So we do rounds and offer information and training they may not have,” says Dr. Quartey.
The hospital can handle only certain surgeries, so when they announce a US medical team is coming, the line begins. It’s a long one. Some Ghanians travel 200 miles to get there. The medical team sees about 2,000 patients and performs between 150-200 surgeries in 10 days. Because they stay in the hospital, they’re on hand for emergencies.
“One girl came in with a perforated bowel,” recalls Dr. Quartey. A life-threatening condition with or without treatment, it can be fatal. But not for this girl. “If she had come in any other time, she would likely have died,” he says.
The conditions vary, depending on the team’s specialties. In the temporary vision clinics in Ecuador, it’s mostly astigmatism and crossed eyes. Dr. Silbert explains, “They don’t make eye contact. The day after surgery, they’re making eye contact with you. It’s a matter of being self-confident and how you view yourself, whether you look at people or not.” For some children in this remote area, Dr. Silbert might be the first doctor they’ve ever met.
Conestoga Eye sees 250 kids a day on trips to Ecuador and gave out 120 pairs of glasses this year.
Getting There
These trips can make a big difference, both in the lives of those who go and those who receive care. But getting there is not without challenges. Neither is staying there.
To reach Riobamba, Ecuador, Dr. Silbert’s group flies over smoking volcanoes to land in Quito, one of the most dangerous runways in the world. “The trip’s pretty epic,” says Heather Modjesky, director of community outreach at Conestoga Eye, Dr. Silbert’s practice. “We get in at 1 a.m., and we’re up and out at 7 a.m. the next day.” Five hours to one of the poorest areas in the country and another couple hours over curvy, rural mountain roads. (Not counting the inevitable stops for cows.) And then there’s the cold; despite being on the equator, Ecuador’s Andes mountain range is chilly. So is the team as they work in unheated buildings and use “barely existent toilet facilities.” And this is what Dr. Silbert calls “lots of fun.”
To get to India, the flight alone is 18 hours; Dr. Bornt notes, “It’s a good 30-40 hours door-to-door.”
In coastal Ghana, the risk for malaria is high; most of the hospital’s patients have it. The team takes anti-malarial medicine before they go and needs multiple immunizations. They ship their own food and water and bring their own medical supplies. They sleep tucked into mosquito nets in bunk beds. And they pray they have running water…in the OR.

Dr. Bornt in India
The Brilliant Trade-off
Yet along with risk comes opportunity. Dr. Quartey explains, “Everything is improvised. We do whatever we have to do to save lives.” Even a nonmedical team member may hold surgical instruments, like a retractor; check vitals; or manually ventilate a patient (the hospital has no ventilators).
What stands out to Dr. Bornt is patients’ attitudes. In India, one woman was lying on the operating table undergoing surgery, wide awake with only a spinal block (anesthesia is expensive there). “She tapped me on the arm, touched her hands to her lips and blew me a kiss,” recalls Dr. Bornt. “It’s just very touching.”
Living in a developing country, even for just a week, can be interesting. “They measure income differently in Riobamba,” says Modjesky. “They’ll say ‘I have one cow that produces so many gallons of milk and chickens that produce this many eggs.’” She loves the food. “The empanadas are always amazing, and they give us lots of bananas. They’re different than they are at home; by lunchtime, most of our group asks if they can just have bananas.” Locals express their gratitude by cooking a traditional dish, cuy (pronounced “kwee”). Not everyone’s crazy about it. “But when else,” jokes Modjesky, “are they going to be able to say they ate roasted guinea pig?”
Not Just for Doctors
Of the millions of Americans who travel abroad each year on short-term mission trips, not all, of course, are physicians. Dr. Bornt says all kinds of help are needed: teachers, construction workers, engineers. Dr. Quartey agrees: “Everybody has something to contribute. There’s always something you can do.”
Staff, as well as parents of patients at Conestoga Eye and others, join in. Dr. Silbert built these trips into the infrastructure of his practice, an extension of their Kindersee Clinic outreach at George Washington Elementary in Lancaster. Last year, Dr. Silbert was joined by, among others, a rabbi. Next year, 13 students and an instructor from Princeton University are going as part of a medical Spanish course.
Each traveler has unique reasons for going. Dr. Bornt puts it this way: “I believe we’re put on earth to try to make it a better place. Since my specialty is gynecology, that seems like the best thing to give to women. So many around the world have no access to female medical care.” Modjesky says if they didn’t go, “a lot of these kids would never receive care.” Definitely possible, since in Ecuador, there are only two pediatric ophthalmologists in the whole country. Dr. Quartey finds satisfaction in working with the patients as well as the staff: “It’s gratifying helping people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to help themselves. To go back and help people is good.”
Dr. Silbert says it’s a chance “to let these kids know someone cares about them.” He adds, “The cool thing about being a physician is you get to do stuff like this. You can really have an impact on people. It’s one of the things we forget: just how important what we do as physicians is. It sort of brings you back to that.”