A Christian Veterinary Fellowship Trip

Faith and Veterinary Medicine

by Kelly Barton

Ross University

In March of this year, I finally achieved a goal- I was able to use my veterinary skills and knowledge to serve the Yup’ik people of coastal southwestern Alaska. Real people, real animals, real medicine. It was amazing. I think often times, we (vet students) go on these trips to change the lives of the animals we serve and to better our medical/surgical skills. Of course, that was floating around in my thoughts too, but what I was really excited for was the people. I know, people are gross, right? At least we joke about it a lot, but I have found over my time in vet school that one of my favorite parts of veterinary medicine is providing client education and helping people to make informed decisions about their own animals. This trip to Alaska turned out to be so much more about the people than just the medical services the team provided and I couldn’t have been more excited.

North Carolina’s Christian Veterinary Fellowship (a chapter of the non-profit organization Christian Veterinary Missions) visits the southwest coast of Alaska twice a year, in March and in October, led by fearless leader Dr. Page Wages. They provide vaccinations, spay/neuter services, general medical services, and Rabies/dog bite prevention education to various villages. They also provide prayer for anyone that wants it, and frequently have opportunities to learn about the Yup’ik culture through conversations and interactions with villagers. The group attempts to revisit villages every 2-3 years to help build lasting relationships. I was honored and humbled that I was selected to join the team on their March journey to the great white North.

During a conference (Real Life Real Impact) held at several locations each year, including at Ross University, Dr. Wages had posed some food for thought that stuck with me. She had asked if we planned on being a veterinarian that happened to be a Christian, or a Christian that happened to be a veterinarian. Indeed, I had mulled this over for several years, and pondered how I might pursue sharing the love of Christ through my knowledge and skills in veterinary medicine. Veterinary medicine, as a science and profession, does not tend to automatically lend itself towards integrating one’s faith. This trip was the first time I felt that I had a chance to do that in “the real world”, outside of school. God had provided a perfect opportunity to share compassion and love to pets and their owners.

The location that we served provides unique logistical challenges due to the remote nature of the villages and the often unforgiving weather. All medical and surgical supplies as well as all food for the duration of the trip has to be flown to Bethel, a bit of a hub town in SW Alaska via commercial flights. Past that, very small bush planes are the main mode of transportation to the villages due to lack of a connecting road system (though snowmobiles are a potential alternative, just much slower and less efficient). After a wall of snow had delayed us overnight, we put our 30+ bags of medical supplies (including an autoclave that stays with the local health department until we come), personal effects, and food onto four bush planes and headed to our first village, Toksook Bay.

Our day in Toksook was very busy with a constant stream of spays/neuters and vaccinations at our temporary clinic set up in the local bingo hall as well as a team heading out to do door-to-door vaccinations and prayer. After Toksook, we split into 2 teams, one heading to Nightmute and the other to Tununak. At both locations, many dogs were spayed/neutered and numerous vaccinations were given. The plan had been to go to 2 additional villages, but poor weather conditions changed our plans. There was a lot of travel, several late nights, and many long days. It was all worth it though.

During recovery from anesthesia, performing exams, and doing door-to-door vaccines, we were given the chance to learn about peoples’ lives, their struggles, and their beliefs. Many wanted us to pray for them, for anything from family health, to help with addictions to drugs or alcohol, and even just for smooth recoveries for their beloved pets. I particularly loved speaking with people when I was on recovery duty and watching them monitor their sleeping animals, worried about them. These people love their animals dearly and it was heart-warming to see them interact with them. I was filled with joy to be able to help them provide medical procedures and treatments.

My other favorite part was playing with the kids as we went to retrieve more vaccines from the bingo hall in Toksook. A small herd of children opened up to us and were playing silly games, asking questions and helping us carry our supplies around. Veterinary medicine can be very rewarding in and of itself, but meeting the people of these remote villages was arguably even more rewarding. The best parts of the trip all involved speaking with the villagers and having a chance to invest some time into their lives. I’m not sure who got more out of this trip, the ones serving or the ones being served.

My visit to Alaska was an incredible experience, one that can’t be completely prepared for and requires an open mind and flexibility to re-adjust plans frequently. While it did not provide surgical experience (only licensed vets could perform surgery for legal purposes), I can vaccinate like a champ (including very wiggly dogs, outside in the dark!) and got to practice some foundation skills like exams, medication administration, recovery, and so on. Most importantly though, it gave me hope that in the future, I can continue to use my skills in veterinary medicine to serve my God through serving His people and their animals.

For more details on the trip, please visit NCSU’s blog at https://ncsucvmmissions.wordpress.com/category/alaska/

Snowmobiling between villagesThe planes were very small! Only 6 people fit on each plane.A very friendly village dog looking for a belly rub. Hanging out with the kids in Toksook.

Snow Cat

Anna-Marie Struble from Michigan State University sent in her cuties Leif, Bella, and Tomas. What a fun bunch to spend your days with. Especially, with this hot summer; I would love to be at the beach with this crew. 

Hi, there! My name's Leif and I love adventuring with my mom and dad. As a husky, I think summer gets too warm in Michigan so I like to cool down in the water. Mom likes that it kind of counts as a bath. The only bad thing about a lake as great as Lake Michigan is that the waves get water into my ears... and that's scary!

 

I'm Leif the husky mix and this is my BFF Bella, the pit mix. Bella is really brave about fetching sticks in the waves of Lake Michigan so I let her bring them closer to shore so I can steal them. This game is so fun!

 

What a nice day, huh? My name is Tomas. Mom's friends think I'm a dog in disguise, but I'm just a 16lb DSH that loves long walks at the state park and stealing oranges.

Captain Gatsby S. Trouble

Check out these wonderful peices by Snighdha Paul from Western University. 

Captain Gatsby S. TroubleTQ

Where the Mate and cattle never end

Uruguay Veterinary Experience -

Where the Mate and cattle never end

by Robert Stenger

Mississipi State University, CVM

Becoming a veterinarian is an aspiration that came later to me than many of my peers. After high school I left West Virginia and the family farm to attended Denison University - majoring in biology with the goal of becoming a wildlife biologist or ecologist. I thoroughly enjoyed the material and studying biology, but by the end of my senior year having been away from the farm for a few years I realized I would like to find a way to combine my interest in biology with livestock. Veterinary medicine seemed like the perfect fit, and I have not looked back yet. I was able to do a fair bit of traveling before veterinary school having traveled to Australia, the Republic of Georgia, and across the USA on a four-month motorcycle trip to Alaska. I figured that it would be the end of my travels once I entered veterinary school; boy was I mistaken. Mississippi State has  been amazingly supportive of international travel providing travel grants and working with students to establish international connections. In the summer of 2016, I went to Uganda for six-weeks to work on an international research collaboration investigating mountain gorilla internal parasites; I just returned from spending a month in Uruguay; and within the next year I have plans to travel to Romania and Australia. Rather than closing the door on my passion for travel, veterinary medicine has opened more doors for me. It is an ideal combination, as I can travel and work with livestock and farmers while I do it, giving me the best of both.

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My family has a cattle and sheep which is the root of my passion for livestock medicine and also is how I started down the path that culminated in me spending a month working in Uruguay. My father showed me an article about a veterinary, Dr. Juan Scalone, from Uruguay who had visited sheep farms in Ohio. I tracked down his contact information, and then arranged for him to visit me and Mississippi State’s veterinary school and my family’s farm. We talked a lot about veterinary medicine, agriculture, and my passions and goals. He became a mentor for me. Although he now lives in Italy, he worked to set up an experience in Uruguay for me. He put me in contact with some of his family there and farmers that were his past clients. After about a year and a half of planning I had everything ready and set off for Uruguay. Well almost everything, I worked as best I could to learn Spanish before arriving to Uruguay, but with school and everything going on I wasn’t able to progress as much as I would have liked.

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I arrived early in the morning to the international airport after having short layovers in Miami and Bogota. I would spend the first couple days with a friend in the capital city, Montevideo, before heading to the interior to work. Uruguay, roughly the size of North Dakota, has a population of about 3.4 million with over a third of that located in and around Montevideo. I stayed in Montevideo for just a few days before catching a bus for Salto, a town located on the River Uruguay which serves as the border with Argentina. Uruguay is a country very dependent on agriculture; it has the highest beef production per capita of any country. The country is divided by the Rio Negro with the land south of it more fertile and used more intensively while the land to the north is generally less productive and used for more extensive livestock grazing. I spent most of my time working on large expansive ranches of beef cattle and sheep.

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A two day intrauterine insemination course at the University of Uruguay San Antonio Campus and Farm. Inseminating a Merino ewe.

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The first day in Salto I woke up at 4:30am and drove a couple hours north to the border with Brazil. I was with three veterinarians and our job for the day was to bleed 1,400 head of cattle for brucellosis testing. Not that bleeding cattle is the most technically challenging task, but when you do that many it helps you get quicker for sure, so I appreciated the experience. We had three, and a half, veterinarians going full bore, and a handful of gauchos keeping the chute full for us. It took us all day, but we finished. It was a hot and smelly ride back to town that evening. There is a big difference between Spanish when you are meeting someone for coffee or at the airport versus when you are working cattle. The accents of the people in northern Uruguay, especially the farm workers are very challenging and the content was filled with slang and technical farm jargon that I’d not learned in my Spanish courses. Luckily, as I told a friend, the language of working cattle is universal. For the most part the cattle in Uruguay act and react the same way as cattle in the USA, so I felt comfortable working cattle because my lack of fluency in Spanish was compensated by my proficiency in cattle handling. While in Uruguay, I also got experience in ultra-sounding pregnancy in cattle, processing calves, feedlot management, and even a two-day course on intrauterine insemination of sheep. I spent four days working on the ranch of the family I was staying with. They saddled up some Creole horses and asked if I had ridden before. In the past ten years I have probably been on a horse for a combined hour. They asked if I knew how to ride, I honestly said yes, but I think they may have been more hesitant to let me ride if they knew the limited extent of my experience. Over the next couple weeks in Uruguay I would spend many days working cattle and sheep by horseback. It like many things during my time in Uruguay was trial by fire. I was able to gain a lot of technical experience and learn some tricks about handling livestock, but the most significant result of the experience were the connections I made and relationships I built.

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Three Gauchos; from left to right: Robert Stenger, Alvaro the farm worker, and Manual Brites, the farm owners son. Rounding up cattle and sheep for vaccinations and deworming.

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To describe all the people I met and the experiences I had in Uruguay is not in the scope of this short essay, but the kindness and hospitality shown to me was truly remarkable. The household I stayed with treated me as part of the family. I was able to work on their farm, go to the pool with their teenage son, and go grocery shopping with the mother. The children spoke some English but most all our conversation were in Spanish. It greatly improved my language skills and appreciation for the daily life in Uruguay to be immersed like this in a family. Along with many others, I hope will visit me in the USA, the family had two sons in their twenties. One is a veterinary student and one an agronomist. I told them they both need to take English lessons, so they can come stay with me. I will likely be settling down into a rural large or mixed animal practice and taking over my family farm in West Virginia. This means I will not have much time to travel. My hope is that I will have enough friends from Uruguay and my other travels who will visit me. That way it will feel like I am traveling even when I am working at home.

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Puppy-dog eyes

We start this issue of The Vet Gazette off with a cutest pet submission winner. Avery Goho, from North Carolina State University, College of Veterinary Medicine, shares this cutie with us. Those eyes will melt you heart faster than the burning fire behind her.

"Mia, the sweetest little beggar you ever did see. Good luck saying no to those eyes!”