Amy Smith remembers what she felt as she read Alex Haley’s 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family as a precocious eleven-year-old.
“His descriptions about Africa and generations of slavery and being brought here violently…it affected me. I’ve always had a strong sense of social justice.”
Haley’s vivid descriptions of living in Gambia and the village of Jufureh that Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte was reputedly abducted from also captured Smith’s imagination. “I knew I had to go to Africa someday.”
The novel’s descriptions of the poverty, disease and tribal tensions that still haunt much of Africa would be experienced first-hand when the kid from rural Greene County grew up to made her dream come true.
“I had to wait for the right time,” Amy admits. She credits grandmother Carrie Bell Smith, a Rogersville Methodist Church regular, for instilling in her the value of service unto others. “She raised me since I was three. Grandma would deliver cookies to shut-ins. She took me with her and I took them to the door. They were so thrilled. It was kind of addicting.”
Amy remembers the strength of Carrie Bell “in her 50s running the house and the farm, all those animals. I remember we had 77 lambs when I was ten. I’ll never fill those shoes but I like to try.”
Amy did more than read above her grade level as a kid – she journaled her way through high school and beyond, developing a writer’s eye for seeing the world. After earning a nursing degree at Waynesburg College in 1990, she returned for a degree in English and Journalism in 1992.
For the next 11 years she would put away her dreams of Africa and be a cardiac nurse at Mon General Hospital in Morgantown. It was a time to stay close to home, to care for family and attend the family church in Rogersville. There would always be time to do good work.
Amy was a seasoned medical professional when her time finally came. “When my grandmother died in 2000, I started looking up mission groups online.”
Volunteers in Medical Missions (VIMM) from South Carolina recruits physicians, nurses, medical students and assistants to go on one and two week missions to bring medicine and healthcare into poverty stricken, sometimes war torn countries in Africa. Amy got a recommendation from Pastor Bruce Judy, included a copy of her nursing degree, and was accepted.
The Observer Reporter covered her first trip to Zambia in 2001. With warthogs and baboons along the road, “it was everything I’d pictured in my head.” Then came the reality of the first primitive clinic and the 300 patients they saw that day, mostly women, some walking miles with sick children. Knowing there was little they could do for major illnesses, “we did the basics, Tylenol for fever and antibiotics as long as they lasted. They were so appreciative of everything. It was heartbreaking. I wish we could have done more. It was a drop in the bucket.”
Two exhausting weeks and 6,600 grateful patients later VIMM returned stateside and Amy told her story to Greene County. “I know it touched my spirit because I now have a real passion for this.”
Amy’s last mission trip to South Sudan in June started with a late-night trip back to the airport to pick up a stray team member and delayed luggage, and then a morning flight to the airport in Juba, where she was greeted by Abass, a nurse, and Dunna, wife of Abass – another part of the family Amy has claimed over the years. “He calls me mom… They named their daughter Amy. I’m a grandma!”
South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, but unresolved political and ethnic tensions flared up in 2013, leading to years of conflict in the underdeveloped, poverty-stricken new nation. Amy remembers that at some point “VIMM thought it was too dangerous to go but a tiny group from our team decided to go anyway. We’ve been going ever since whenever we can.”
Abass is the nurse Amy met as the fighting of 2013 continued and the ETA camp near Juba began filling. Abass, an Anyuak from the village Pochalla, was educated in Ethiopia, then returned home to become an integral part of the mission of mercy.
Over the years, the team’s trips have had to deal with the humanitarian crisis brought on by government and tribal warfare and years of drought and famine. They were unable to go in 2018 (too dangerous) and 2020-21 when the pandemic ravaged the world.
But those years on the ground in South Sudan have built relationships with the people in the villages and refugee camps in and around the capital Juba that can be supported when the team isn’t there. Sending funds via Venmo means that money for medicine, supplies, critical operations and even food and schooling can be crowd sourced from friends, neighbors, churches, and organization back home.
Then, on June 24, Amy shared: “Abass’s wife Dunna works at the IDP (Internally Displaces Persons) camp here in Juba. She saw “Little John Boy” there, and told the team. [John was a child who had a complicated facial mass removed.] … after the fighting broke out and everyone fled Pibor…I had no real expectation of ever seeing him again. Today, we saw him.”
The photos of the IDP camp are filled with barefoot children, dusty streets and blanketed doorways. John Boy stands in the doorway of one tent. His now-symmetrical ten-year old face has circular scars around the right eye and cheek that are still healing. His gaze is solemn, direct. His hair is rust colored. While his face is healing, he was still suffering from malnutrtion and his mother was bed bound. An effort was made to raise funds in the US for a new wheelchair, and…“We got the wheelchair for John Boys mom! – I still don’t know how she made it to the IDF camp in that broken chair she had. It was the rainy season. It’s a miracle. We also got her treated – she had malaria real bad. What’s really cool, she’s letting Abass and Dunna adopt John Boy, she was worried he’d be running in the streets at the camp and get in trouble. He’s going to school now and they’re taking real good care of him.”
Support keeps coming in from “people who have watched this story evolve and have become involved.” And Juba’s just as close as a Zoom meeting or conference call.