Rich Sicard’s trips abroad with students in the health professions are all about connections: making connections between training and experience, making connections with the local church, making connections between students and advisers, and making connections with God’s mission.
Rich is an InterVarsity staff member working with graduate students on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. He disciples students in the schools of Pharmacy, Medicine, Law and Business. This spring he traveled to Nicaragua twice with medical teams coordinated by the Global Health Outreach ministry of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
“My goal is to get first-year medical students and other students in the medical field onto a trip like this to give them experience and to help them think about the stewardship of their education and their abilities for the world,” he says.
A week is not a very long time, and medical students are far from the skilled professionals that they one day hope to become. Yet Rich believes a trip like this can have a significant impact. “Students learn from this experience; it helps them to set goals for the rest of their education,” he says. In addition, large groups of Nicaraguan men, women, and children received much needed medical assistance.
On the second of the two trips, Rich led a team of three first-year medical students, two second-year pharmacy students, two doctors, a nurse, and a physicians assistant (PA). They were part of a larger group totaling 35 in all.
They worked through local churches and treated hundreds of Nicaraguans who were too poor to otherwise receive quality health care. He found it challenging to keep from getting distracted by the poverty. “We did not go to Nicaragua to bring up their standard of living to our own,” he says. “We can feel guilty for all that we have and think that if they just had what we have, they would be alright. If we’re not careful we can get distracted by the outward appearance of poverty and can easily stop being Christ to them.”
Rich’s job was to dispense eye glasses. He made it a priority to ask the name of each person treated and to pray with them. One woman who came to the team for treatment was 95 years old. When it was time to pray for her she told her caregiver, “No, I want to pray for you.” For Rich that was an example of the importance of ministry that both gives and receives, as expressed by the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter four. “I’m looking to not only be a blessing but to receive blessings,” Rich says. “I want to give people a chance to bless me and to encourage me.”
Learning how to put faith into practice in the real world is a valuable experience for Christian students. “No question, it was an amazing experience from both a clinical and spiritual perspective,” said one of the students, Sean Patrick Fullan. “The doctors, nurses, and PA’s were all excited about teaching the students. I wish I had been doing trips like this since I was in high school.”
Rich wants to lead a trip like this at the end of every school year for his students in the health professions and their advisers. It not only brings together the needy world and the resource-filled world, but also fosters conversations and experiences that forge friendships, professional relationships, and service commitments that cannot be duplicated any other way.
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