‘A difference every day’

BR group runs African hospital to provide spiritual, physical healing

The office where Cheryl Yennie works blends in with the Baton Rouge businesses neighboring it, but clients never enter its doors.

They all live in Africa.

Medical Centers of West Africa was started by some members of Chapel on the Campus in Baton Rouge in 1988. Headquartered on South Acadian Thruway, it operates Hôpital de Meskine, a 100-bed, Christian hospital in west Africa.

The “medical, faith-based ministry that seeks to offer spiritual and physical healing,” raised the funds to purchase the land, build the hospital buildings and buy the needed equipment, said Yennie, the director of administration.

The nonprofit organization was incorporated soon after the group began discussing the project in 1988, and the hospital opened in 1994, said Lyman Osborne, former president of the MCWA board of directors.

Osborne and his wife, Marge, were at the first organizational meeting in 1988 and were instrumental in planning the hospital, which started with 30 beds, Yennie said.

About a third of the organization’s supporters are from the Baton Rouge area, but the ministry has supporters across the nation, she said.

Yennie has stories of what the hospital has meant to people in Africa and talks about what it has meant to people here, including herself.

“I wanted my life to make a difference every day,” Yennie said, recalling how she started volunteering on the ministry’s board in 2002 after a friend approached her. “The more I volunteered, the more I became passionate about this ministry.”

Though she has traveled to the Hôpital de Meskine three times in the past decade, Yennie said her real job is in Baton Rouge.

“I just do logistics,” she said, adding that she acts as the U.S. “arms and legs for the missionaries. Every activity I do here lets the team members do what they’re called to do there. I feel like I am part of the team, and I love that.”

In addition to long-term missionaries, short-term missionaries can work at the site from two weeks to two years.

If someone says they want to go, “there is usually a role for them,” Yennie said.

The hardest part is finding enough doctors to send abroad. Doctors from this country generally cannot be gone from their practices for very long, she said.

The ministry works with several other organizations to provide medical and support staff, equipment and other resources for the hospital.

Cameroonians serve as the main medical professionals, with 130 working in the hospital, Yennie said.

“They’re the ones running the hospital, including administration,” she said.

Missionaries to the hospital mainly have the responsibilities of mentoring, consulting and training Cameroonians, Yennie said.

“God has continued to use this ministry to change lives in Cameroon,” Yennie said. “We’ve truly seen miracles here. The light of Jesus shines through.”

Nevertheless, she said she thinks people in the United States “could learn some things” from the people in Cameroon, who have purpose in life, but don’t have a multi-tasking mindset.

Yennie said family is important to the Cameroonians, who are eager to learn and grow. The Cameroon people are concerned about people’s hearts and not how much or how little they have. “That humbles me,” she said.

Roxanne Dill, instructor at LSU and a member of the ministry board, taught missionaries’ children in Cameroon from 1997 to 1998 and 2000 to 2001.

Dill brought her two teenagers with her, and they studied at The Barefoot Academy and befriended the children of other team members.

“Their time in Africa changed the way they look at themselves and at the world,” Dill said.

Both her children now work in the medical profession; her daughter is a nurse-midwife and her son is in his second year of medical school. Both see overseas missions work as their life’s calling.

“They both say their time in Africa defined their lives in a positive way, because it made them grateful for the blessings they have as Americans and mindful of the needs of others across the oceans,” she said. “We don’t look at the world the same anymore.”