Arkansas doctor sees Honduras mustard seed grow into tree
8/18/2000
NOTE TO EDITORS: Black and white photos are available. Please note the mandatory credit for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in the cutlines. Information for this story was taken largely from an article written by Scurlock for the Arkansas United Methodist newspaper.
By United Methodist News Service
As 20 years of volunteer work in Honduras come to a close for a retired Arkansas surgeon, he looks back with satisfaction on having seen a mustard seed grow into a tree of health care service.
On his first visit to the village of Gualcinse in western Honduras nearly two decades ago, Bill Scurlock of El Dorado depended on a mule to haul his equipment and performed surgeries on desperately ill people with the help of a flashlight.
Moved by the needs he saw there, he returned with others at least once each year to help provide clean water, construct health care facilities, deliver medical services and build churches. Teams consisted of volunteers from the El Dorado area representing a variety of church groups. Scurlock himself is a United Methodist. A Baptist church arranged most of the trips.
Scurlock, 67, retired from medical practice in 1994 and decided that a trip to Gualcinse earlier this year would be his last. In contrast to that first trip in the early 1980s, he was met at the airstrip by a new hospital bus and taken to a 12-room hospital that houses a modern operating room, recovery room, patient rooms, pharmacy, modern sterilizer, administrative offices and $50,000 generator. The hospital has two full-time physicians and a trained nursing staff, and is served by visiting orthopedists and surgeons.
The Arkansas physician compared the Honduras project to the mustard seed in Jesus' parable - both growing slowly but surely.
"I now realize that I have had the opportunity to see God work in this remote area, and to see growth take place," he said.
Scurlock has shared his "life-changing adventure" with people throughout Arkansas and beyond, and has been interviewed by Peter Jennings on ABC's "World News Tonight." With each opportunity, he tells of his first trip when he was accompanied by a surgical team consisting of two anesthetists, two scrub nurses, an automobile mechanic and a Louisiana state trooper.
A Presbyterian American missionary, who had issued an urgent plea to the United States for surgeons, met the team. Equipment from the small planes was packed on mules for an uphill, two-mile trip to Gualcinse.
"We unloaded the equipment into a stucco-mud building with a partial dirt floor," Scurlock recalled. "This served as the clinic. We would do surgery there. The anesthesia machine had been dismantled and brought in piecemeal. It was assembled into working order by the light of a kerosene lantern."
At dawn, Scurlock went to the window and was shocked by what he saw. "Before me was a solid line of humanity with every conceivable surgical problem, extending all the way down the street," he said.
At first he wondered how to meet the challenge, but then he turned to God for help. "With faith, perhaps, all things are possible," he concluded.
Two operating rooms were improvised. The operating light in one was an automobile fog light attached to a car battery and powered by a small gasoline generator. In a small adjoining room, procedures were done under local or spinal anesthesia with the use of flashlights. Instruments were sterilized in a pressure cooker over an open fire. Water was brought from the river. The mechanic and policeman became surgical assistants, even though neither had been in an operating room before.
That first week, Scurlock said, 70 operations were performed. Some of the patients were brought on stretchers from as far as eight miles away. The totally disabled cases were chosen first. Surgeries included hysterectomies, hernia repair, cholecystectomies, thyroidectomies, mastectomies, removal of ovarian tumors, parotidectomies, removal of large soft-tissue tumors and operations for congenital defects. When the team left, the line of patients had not diminished.
An experience on that first visit has continued to haunt Scurlock.
"I examined a man with a far advanced cancer in his abdomen, and found it inoperable. Using my limited Spanish, I told him, 'Sir, you came too late.' " He looked up and replied, 'No sir, I've been here all my life. You came too late!' That was true! These people live their lifetime without seeing a surgeon."
On that first trip, Scurlock promised himself that he would come back once or twice a year. "I have done that. Many people, including my wife, an RN, have been involved in 10-day missions in this small village."
Among their accomplishments, he points to: · A dam and waterline providing clean water and, according to Scurlock, saving more lives than all the volunteer surgical teams combined. · A concrete block building where more than 500 operations have been performed without a significant complication, a feat that Scurlock said couldn't be matched in his private practice. · Five churches that have growing congregations.
While he marvels at the growth of the mustard seed in Honduras and the sense of God's support in the entire process, Scurlock said the words of the dying peasant continue to ring in his ears: "No sir, I've been here all my life. You came too late!"
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