It would be easy to mythologize Sue Makin. She works in an exotic place– Africa–in a rural hospital, with a life-affirming task–trying to save the lives of mothers and newborn babies.
But she is a very articulate, practical, no-nonsense person without pretense.
Sue grew up in Florida without a clear life direction. After college and vocational school, she settled into work as a hospital lab technician. Her work in the hospital challenged her to go to medical school. While studying, she began to pray about the possibility of mission service. While still a lab tech, she volunteered in a health clinic where she saw the toll on young women from drug use, STDs and other complications. Her interest grew in the OBGYN specialty, where doctors address the problems she saw. It has been a satisfying choice. “A birth is a happy event, I sometimes get to do a little surgery and internal medicine. There are elements of the beginning and end of things,” she says.
In 1989, she went overseas as a PC(USA) mission worker assigned to the Good Shepherd Hospital in Zaire. (now Democratic Republic of Congo.)
She saw many women with lifethreatening, sometimes fatal, pregnancies. “While I was in training, I saw one mother die in four years. In (DRC), it was one mother a month.” For eight years, (DRC) “felt right, like the place God wanted me to be.”
In 1998, she transferred to Malawi. “It was a new place and I went with fresh ideas and enthusiasm. She works in the hospital in the village of Mulanje. It seems small–two markets and a gas station. But 250,000 people live in the surrounding area. And there is more need. Where there were 50 baby deliveries a month in the hospital in (DRC), there are 250 a month in Mulanje. Sue is one of nine OB-GYN doctors in the country, six of them at their hospital/medical school.
She is working by example and as a lecturer, to encourage health care professionals to put patients first. “If medical personnel put patients first, all actions are toward that goal. If not, that goal gets lost.”
When she is not in Africa, she is back in the U.S. talking about her work. Her speaking schedule gives her an opportunity to gauge the local church situation at home. While some pastors are world-aware, others “are not thinking beyond the shores of America; there are so many ministry opportunities in their neighborhoods,” she observes.
Some churches graciously ask her back time after time. She is happy to go, but sometimes senses that such churches zero in on a small number of mission workers and focus only on them. She would like to see more vision for the worldwide church, she says.
She and her colleagues need to do a better job of informing people in America’s churches about what the current mission challenges and opportunities are. “As I go to churches, I learn that they support other worthy groups, not ours, and we do the same kind of work. We just don’t advertise on TV or have slick magazines. It shows people are interested; we have to do our best to interpret the mission of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)”
