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Marcee Vest interacts with a young boy at the Leprosy Hospital.

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Mission trips were humbling experience

A trip to Nepal in South Asia this past summer and one to Malawi and South Africa in 2006 provided valuable life and medical lessons for Marcee Vest.
A student at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) in Blacksburg, Vest, 26, says the mission experiences were very educational and rewarding, “just to be put in your place. We have so much here we take for granted. It is humbling to go to other places, to live like they live, to see what they have, and to experience and go through what they do.”
The trip to Nepal August 16-29 was arranged by another VCOM student who had done other mission trips there over the years. Along with Vest, a Floyd, Virginia native, students Bobby Rhoades from Alabama, Jessica Pope from Tennessee, Mike Buscher from Connecticut, and Kati Carlite from California made the journey.
First stop was the Anandaban Leprosy Mission Hospital, the largest leprosy hospital in Nepal. The 100-bed facility includes a variety of services for leprosy patients – including outpatient clinics, rehabilitation, a prosthetics and footwear department and a research lab.
Vest worked in the medical and surgery wards. She says that while she had studied about leprosy, she had never seen the disease prior to her visit to Nepal. “It was a learning experience to see it, learn what it does, and the treatments for it.”
Leprosy continues to be a stigma, she notes. “Originally the disease was feared, and a long time ago it was seen as a curse. Maybe that’s how the stigma started. It’s still like that some.” However, Vest adds, “it’s very hard to contract leprosy. Basically the infectious dose is very high. It’s almost impossible to get it from being near somebody. It’s very hard to contract, yet they put patients in separate wards, so you definitely still see that shunning.”
Part of the fear of the disease relates to its physical effects, Vest comments. “It’s so disfiguring people are scared of it.”
But interacting with the patients was the most rewarding of times, Vest says. “It was cool to be able to interact with them and show them compassion. They loved just having us come and sit with them…taking pictures with us…just having attention.”
Most of the patients in the hospital speak Nepali and “broken” English.
After working in the hospital, the medical students took time for a three-day trek in the Himalayan Mountains. The students did a lot of walking and enjoyed the views, and they stayed in houses along the way. The group got up to 8,000 meters in elevation. Vest says, “We got to see Mt. Everest (at about 29,000 feet, or 8,800 meters). It’s up so high in the clouds, but we were able to see it.”
During the last part of the trip, the medical students worked at the Kinder Orphanage in Kathmandu, Nepal. The orphanage provides a home for 22 girls, ages 4-19. The majority of the girls have been rescued from sex slavery. Others have been rescued from sex abuse in homes or other bad home situations. Nepal has the number child disappearance rate in the world, attributed to sex slave trafficking, explains Vest. “Every day 20 children there are trafficked to India and the Middle East for sex slavery. About 2.6 million children are engaged in different sectors of child labor.”
At the orphanage, many of the girls needed overall physical exams, and the medical students helped with that task as well as talked to them about the changes they go through as young women. Vest says her church – the Presbyterian Church of Floyd, other individual members, friends and family gave her donations for the trip, and she used the extra money she did not need for her expenses for the students. She and others bought supplies, mostly medical supplies, for the orphanage. Included were various medications. Since there are no such things as pharmacies in Nepal, the people there are able to buy antibiotics over the counter.
Vest says the girls at the orphanage appreciated the three days the group spent with them.
In Africa, in 2006, Vest worked with AIDS organizations and did home-based care. She traveled by riding a bike or walking to different villages and treated AIDS patients.
She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 2005. She began the four-year program at Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2006. That school is a privately funded medical school, but has a research affiliation with Virginia Tech.
When Vest graduates, she will have a D.O. after her name, rather than a M.D. She explains, “There’s not a lot of difference between the two, but we get extra training in osteopathic manipulative medicine,” sometimes using other approaches, rather than medicines, to help relieve pain and other maladies.
Vest says she is still contemplating where her career will take her after medical college. She believes she will specialize in obstetrics and gynecology and will probably end up on the East Coast, either North Carolina, Virginia or South Carolina.
Last month, her studies took her to Allegheny Regional Hospital, and she says that area is similar to Floyd. She says she has gained a new appreciation for rural areas and enjoys working in smaller hospitals as much as the larger ones.
Wherever her career takes her, she is likely to carry the same philosophy that has been with her on the mission trips. “I serve others by going, but I’m also being served, too, in that I’m becoming more humble.”