Missions veteran gathered Baylor School of Nursing team for Kenya trim

Posted: 8/12/05

Missions veteran gathered Baylor
School of Nursing team for Kenya trim

By Amanda Sawyer

Baylor University

Linda Garner understands the importance of missions education. Missions leaders instilled it in her as a child growing up in a Baptist church, and she wants to pass it on to a rising generation of students at the Baylor School of Nursing.

In 30 years, she has served as a medical missionary in India, journeyed to Romania, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia, Gaza and Macedonia, as well as making annual trips to a clinic in Juarez, Mexico.

Through each trip, she has influenced the medical system of the country she visited by teaching modern medical techniques to nurses and helping the poor.

Through every act of service, she has placed her fingerprint on the world of international medicine. She incorporates this in her method of teaching, passing on the spirit to her nursing students. She urges them to impact their community with their medical skills and abilities both in and out of the classroom.

“I have just tried to help others do the best with what they have,” Garner said. “But they do not have a lot.”

Garner, a member of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, noticed an ad for the Africa ’05 Baylor University mission trip to Kenya in the packet of faculty information given out at the beginning of the year and contacted Steve Graves, then director of missions for Baylor’s university ministries.

She assembled a group of four nursing students to work with 10 pre-medicine students for the trip and gave them a vision for a unified team set on leaving a mark.

“When I heard about this opportunity, I knew there was no way I could pass it up,” said Brendi Poe, a freshman pre-med student who wants to be a medical missionary.

Sarah Brasington served as the spiritual leader for the group by leading prayer for their future trip across the Atlantic Ocean. This was as far as she could take the girls and wished she could make the trip, too. “It was a joy to bring the ladies together so they could get to know each other and share why they were going on the trip,” Brasington said.

All hopes and fears were realized among new friends in this spiritual time, along with clinical basics to be translated to their assigned clinics. Garner also prepared the students for dealing with patients who lived in extreme poverty, those with HIV/AIDS and those who will die soon after arriving at the hospital because they waited too long to come.

Garner has worked in hospitals all over the world—many drastically different from medical facilities in the United States. But some of the learning happens outside of the clinics and hospitals, as trips through the streets where the destitute and desperately ill live show students the size of this difference.