Local medical professionals to help Jamaican village

While the medical professionals and support staff of the Jamaican Christian Medical Mission give a lot to the impoverished residents of Carron Hall, Jamaica, they will tell you that they get back a lot.

"I love people, I love to help people and I feel for the poor," said Dr. Linda Hurt, a Cape Girardeau audiologist who will be making her second mission trip to Jamaica next spring with the group.

The organization, which travels to Jamaica every two years, held a dinner, dance and auction Saturday evening at the Arena Building in Cape Girardeau to raise money for the group's April trip. The mission has held the fundraiser before each of its previous mission trips. Mission president Gwen Maloney said that in the past the event has raised as much as $15,000 of the $20,000 or more required to fund the weeklong trip.

"I love doing it, and I just enjoy what they give to me," said Hurt, who has also been on medical missions to the Philippines and Guatemala with other organizations.

Maloney, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Southeast Hospital, said 1,000 to 1,500 people in Carron Hall will receive treatment during the mission. The services include medical exams, minor surgeries, dental care and vision and hearing testing and correction.

Dr. Scott Gibbs, who serves as medical director of the group, said the mission has helped fulfill his desire to help others.

"When I finished my residency in 1997, I already had an inclination to participate in a medical mission," said Gibbs, who is chief of neurosurgery at Southeast Hospital and a staff neurosurgeon at Saint Francis Medical Center. "I was looking for some opportunities, and God provided."

Gibbs was one of the health care professionals recruited to go on the first trip to Jamaica in 1999 after a request for medical help from a sister church of the Evangelical United Church of Christ in Cape Girardeau.

"Their needs are especially desperate because they have no medical facilities at all in the interior of the island," Gibbs said.

Services are provided at the church, and the medical professionals don't have as much at their disposal to help the people as they would at their regular practice. Gibbs said that challenge helps make him a better doctor.

"You have to think very creatively about what resources you have and what you can do with those resources," Gibbs said. "It makes you realize how fortunate we are to have the resources we have here."