Hospital Ship Surgery Demand

Scott Harrison shares a powerful moment from his time volunteering on a hospital ship in Liberia, where he witnessed the overwhelming need for medical care.

"My 3rd day there was the patient screening. The ship's arrival had been announced by an advance team, flyers had been posted throughout the country, and we were given the football stadium in the center of town to triage people who might come to visit our doctors.

We had 1,500 available surgery slots to fill. I remember thinking to myself, 'Are there 1,500 sick people with facial tumors or cleft lips or blind or lame with leprosy? That sounds like a lot of people.'

At 5:15 AM, still pitch black out, I put on hospital scrubs and jumped into this convoy of land rovers with doctors and surgeons and nurses. We snaked through the city and came to the stadium. There were 5,000 people standing in the dark in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors.

That was such a powerful moment for me, realizing we're going to send 3,500 of these people home without seeing a doctor, without any answer for their affliction. I later learned some of these people had walked for more than a month with their children from neighboring countries just hoping that a doctor might save their child's life.

Doctor Gary said to me, 'Focus on the hope. Don't focus on the 3,500 people we're gonna send home, focus on the 1,500 people who we're gonna help.' That's what I really did for that first year on the ship."