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Spotlights Kate Bolton '81 University of Dayton Quarterly, Winter 2004-05 Kate Bolton, from age 12, knew she wanted to be a medical missionary. “I felt a calling to serve God’s poor,” Bolton said. “Medicine, if I were to work overseas, truly would be helpful to other people.” Bolton, a premedicine major at UD, said the call grew stronger through her years of Catholic schooling. After completing her residency in 1988, she joined Mission Doctors Association, which heeds Luke’s Gospel call to “Heal the sick, and say to them the good news of God is at hand.” Founded in 1959, Mission Doctors places lay Catholic physicians in long- and short-term international assignments with the goal of providing sustainable health care. After nine months in faith formation, Bolton spent two-and-a-half years in Papua, New Guinea. She has since completed three shorter assignments, two in Ghana and one in Cameroon. Her colleagues often express a desire to serve overseas but find “it’s really hard to let go of our affluent lifestyle,” Bolton said. Even with supportive colleagues, taking a month off from a pediatric practice in Modesto, Calif., is difficult. Missionary medical work can be heartbreaking, but “that’s where my heart belongs,” Bolton said. She has seen babies die because clinics lack oxygen and ventilators readily available in the States, searched in vain for potassium salt supplements to ease the pain of a dying teenage heart patient with no hope of a transplant, and watched a comatose child with malaria recover through what she can attribute only to God’s intervention. “You have to remember you’re in God’s hands,” she said. “You have to let go of the ones you can’t save, rejoice in those you can and remember that you did more good than if you hadn’t come at all.” More frustrating are the “artificial barriers” to healing the sick in the States — insurance coverage and hospital contracts. “People say, ‘this is so great you do this,’ but ... when I look at who I am and what makes my heart full, Mission Doctors Association has so much enriched my life.” For more information, see http://missiondoctors.org/. —Deborah McCarty Smith

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