Where Much Is Given

“I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” five-year-old Paul Whitsitt told his kindergarten teacher. And he did—grow up and become a doctor. With his goal of becoming a doctor always present, Dr. Whitsitt served in the Georgia Atlanta Mission from 1975-77, graduated from BYU in 1979, applied to Medical school in 1980 at University of Western Ontario and married his wife, Lisa two weeks before school began. In the second year of medical school, they had their first child. At the end of four years, they had a second child. After a one-year internship from 1984-85, the family moved to Oshawa where Dr. Whitsitt worked in the largest clinic in Canada as a family physician. He began a pharmaceutical research and development company to develop various medications, especially vaccines. In 2004, Dr. Whitsitt developed a travel medicine clinic and certified in travel medicine in 2007.

The Whitsitt’s had four more children. Health problems forced Dr. Whitsitt to shut down his research company, but he continued to practice family and travel medicine. Dr. Whitsitt studied and received a diploma in tropical medicine from West Virginia University, by attending courses two or three weeks a year. In October 2009, he met and joined a team of infectious disease specialist, nurses, pharmacist and doctors from West Virginia University to work at a health clinic in Ocote Paulina, near San Pedro Sula, Honduras. “We held daily medical clinics for a week or we went out to very primitive villages in the mountainous areas. We helped anyone that came through the door.” Dr. Whitsitt says. By the time the team arrived at 8:00 in the mornings, they had a line-up of 50-60 people already waiting. “One young mother walked from another village, leaving at 2:30 in the morning to get to our clinic by 8:00. She carried one baby in a sling and her two other children came with her riding on a donkey. She walked 5½ hours to get help for her children,” Dr. Whitsitt recalls.

“At first, I thought everyone must have great eyes because no one wore glasses. Then I realized they just didn’t have glasses. No one could afford them. So, we brought 300 pairs of glasses with us on one trip. We put up a chart, then put one after another pair of glasses on them until we found which one was best. We then gave them that pair of glasses and they left. I’d worked for 30 years in medicine and got paid for all of it. This was a great opportunity to give back to the world community. After a trip like that you realize how much we have here compared to there. It actually felt sort of “obscene”—how much we have,” Dr. Whitsitt stated.

He made three to four trips with the University usually in the fall or summer. Every member of the team funded their own way. They stayed in homes of the local people. The showers consisted of a pipe sticking out of the wall—no hot water. Many places had no running water at all. “We saw a lot of respiratory diseases from cooking with wood-burning stoves. The smoke doesn’t get vented so they get smoke inhalation problems. It’s always a culture shock to sleep on a mat on the floor and see the way people live and then to come back and see the excesses.”

By 2012, Dr. Whitsitt wanted to broaden his scope and reach out to other places. He found MMI (Medical Ministries International), a faith-based organization out of Texas that had an office in Hamilton. “Initially, they were leery of me because of my LDS faith. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t proselyte.  In fact, a Baptist NGO (Non-governmental Organization) turned me down once because they felt our faith was inconsistent with their beliefs.  I was going as a physician, but they still worried I might try to convert people to the Church.”

Dr. Whitsitt went with the MMI team to Nicaragua. “I wanted to increase my contribution to the world community by sharing the blessings and benefits I’d had—to give health care to people who didn’t have the opportunity to get it any other way. The conditions there aren’t conducive to health. Sewage runs down the ditch, they have no flush toilets. Of all that is done to help people raise their standard of health, these two things—instituting sanitation and providing vaccinations, save more lives than anything else. That’s why the Church is involved with these things—water filters, wells, and sewage disposal—because people get parasites. Even with all we did, bringing our own water and careful hygiene, we still got sick.  When we set up our clinic in Nicaragua people came out of the woodwork.  We saw 600 people in a week. Nicaragua is ranked one of the poorest countries in Central America,” he laments. “People live in tin shacks—in true poverty. “

“People ask me ‘What can you do in only a couple of weeks?  What can I do? Well, I improved the life of at least one person. Did we leave an everlasting impact?  Probably not, but for that week we helped the people we saw. We helped the one. Whatever we did, was worth it to me.”

Over the years, Dr. Whitsitt experienced his own health crisis with heart attacks and cardiac arrests in 2000 and again in 2008. In the spring of 2013, Dr. Whitsitt went a fourth time to Honduras with the West Virginia group. Soon after, he joined a large Church of Christ group from Tennessee that employed varied aspects of help including proselytizing, praying and medical aid. In June of that year, the team went to Guayaquil, Ecuador. Dr. Whitsitt continued to have health issues. In 2013, he was admitted to the hospital for episodes of unstable angina, placements of numbers 11 and 12 cardiac stints and another heart attack. So why the push to help in other countries when he had serious problems at home to deal with? “I just felt this compulsion—I needed to give back,” he states. His wife, Lisa however, had some different advice, “You need to stay home for a while, it’s too risky for you,” she said. He stayed home throughout 2014 and remains home still. “I wanted to go to Africa, but I’m glad I listened to her, because early this year I had a large blood clot in one of my legs.”

Now that things have settled down for Dr. Whitsitt he has his sights on other service trips.  “I’m having a time of stable health now, I would like to go to Africa in the malarial areas. The Lord has allowed me to remain in spite of my difficulties.” Dr. Whitsitt hopes that in three years when he and his wife apply to serve a mission, the Church will see his experience and send him on a medical mission to some place similar to the places he has been. “Service always benefits the giver more than the recipient,” Dr. Whitsitt says. “It’s similar to what happens to those serving a mission—the missionary often gets converted, too, along the way.”

“I wish every young person could go to these areas to understand how 90 percent of people really live. We’re enormously blessed.  We don’t need to proselyte to do the work of God. Our Church doesn’t corner the market on the tremendous humanitarian effort in the world, but we fit in well with other Christian believers.” Dr. Whitsitt continues, “Humanitarian urgings and Christian love—we can participate in that without any problem. Whatever contribution we can give, whatever we are able to do to help people, small or temporary, it is worth it. We are all the Saviour’s people.”
Links: http://canada.lds.org/the-only-answer
http://canada.lds.org/anxiously-engaged-in-a-good-cause