By Marv Knox
Healing wounds is about the easiest part of Karen Alford’s job. Convincing people who believe in voodoo to trust a nurse who practices Western medicine is another matter.
Alford is a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel in Togo, a narrow slice of a country in West Africa. She’s a family nurse practitioner who runs a wound-care clinic in Vogan, a farming village “in the middle of nowhere.”
A 90-something year-old woman with a thumb wound represents what she’s up against. A friend of a friend asked Alford to travel into the countryside to talk to the woman—his grandmother—and help heal her wound, which had opened to the bone.
“This woman lives in a remote, simple village. She’s never had formal schooling. She practices voodoo. She’s elderly, stubborn, ornery and determined to fight,” Alford reported. “She would not let me touch her. She was afraid I would give her the Covid vaccine, and it was going to kill her.”
No matter that Alford didn’t have the Covid vaccine; the woman would not take Western medicine.
So, Alford leaned into a truth that has shaped her long ministry: Medicine can heal wounds, but relationships change hearts.
Alford spent three hours patiently negotiating what the woman would be willing to do apart from receiving medicine. “She finally agreed to soak her thumb in warm water with laundry detergent twice a day,” Alford said. “She also agreed to apply an herb she was using, but also to apply wild daisy, an herb we found in her compound.” No Western medicine.
Two weeks later, the wound was 50 percent better. “The woman was really happy and kept saying, ‘Thanks be to the ancestors.’ Voodoo people believe ancestors heal them,” Alford recalled. “I was saying, ‘Thanks be to God,’ and she said, ‘No, it’s thanks be to the ancestors.’
“So, I said: ‘Well, I’m Christian, so you can thank your ancestors, and I’ll thank God,’ and she said, ‘OK; fine.’”
Alford promised to return in two weeks and pledged to keep praying to God. When she came back, the woman told her: “I know you love me. You would not have continued to help me if you did not love me.”
“She showed me her thumb, and it was healed,” Alford said. “I was so glad it healed, and she was so happy. When I got ready to leave, she said, ‘Thanks be to God!’”
Alford’s journey to Togo—and particularly to love all kinds of people in Jesus’ name—started long ago.
She grew up in Oregon, attending church and loving nature. Her passion for nature led her to major in wildlife biology at the University of Montana. Then she joined the Peace Corps, moved to North Africa and participated in Morocco’s version of the Forest Service. Alford lived in a remote village with a regional indigenous group, the Berbers. She was only the second white person they had seen.
“They were still living like they lived 500 years ago,” she said. “We washed our clothes in the river. I lived in a loft over a barn—dirt floor, no electricity, no running water. And I fell in love with the people. As much as I loved my job, it was the first time people were actually more interesting to me than wildlife.”
When her Peace Corps assignment ended, Alford vowed to return to Morocco as a doctor, so she could help the Berber people.
She came back to the United States, to Tampa, Fla., to attend medical school and learned the best path to provide medical care in the Third World was to become a nurse practitioner. With that training, she could set broken bones, suture wounds, deliver babies, dispense medicine—and change lives.
Across eight years, Alford worked as many as three jobs at a time, attended school, became a registered nurse, worked in an emergency room and studied under a midwife.
During her stay in Tampa, she discovered Bayshore Baptist Church, where her aunt and uncle were members. “I walked through the door and just knew this was going to be my home church,” she remembered.
In the process, she became acquainted with CB, a strong part of Bayshore’s affiliation and identity. As she considered returning to Morocco, CBF Global Missions’ focus on ministry to “the least of these” appealed to her. Although she hated asking for money to raise her ministry support, Bayshore stepped in the breach. The church committed to raising the funds she needed and became her Encourager Church.
Alford’s plans hit a snag when Morocco refused to grant expatriate visas. But geopolitical issues didn’t thwart her calling to provide medical care to people who wouldn’t receive it if she didn’t take it to them. Through the ensuing years, Alford served as a CBF field personnel in several locations alongside a variety of partners:
- She joined a medical ministry on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, working off a boat that traveled up and down the Musi River. “Some CBFers still think I work on that boat,” she laughed.
- When an earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed 500 people on Indonesia’s Mentawai island chain, she joined a relief effort funded by Baptist World Aid Australia. She ran the medical component of the group’s work. She expanded that medical ministry beyond tsunami victims to include long-term community development. She trained local people in simple medical care, disease prevention and hygiene, and taught midwives to deliver babies.
- Then, when she couldn’t get a visa to stay, she worked with Medical Teams International in Uganda, where she ran seven medical clinics in two refugee settlements.
- Finally, she moved to her current post in Togo. In addition to running the wound-care clinic, she’s working on plans to offer more primary health care and to start a community health care program.
Across the years, Alford sometimes had to look on a map to find where she had agreed to live and work. But her enthusiasm for medical ministry in remote locations never waned. In brief discussions about her assignments in Morocco, Indonesia and Togo, she said things like, “I had the coolest job in the world” and “It was the best job on the face of the planet” at least nine times.
She discovered the opportunity to provide medical care in Togo through the efforts of CBF field personnel Lynn and Mike Hutchinson, who worked in Lome, the nation’s capital, at the time.
The Hutchinsons knew entrepreneurial Pastor Hammer Afakule and his wife, Dela, who not only led a church but also founded a school and started a medical clinic in Vogan.
“They knew the clinic needed someone to continue expanding the program,” Alford said. “So, they wrote the job description, and it fit, and that’s how I ended up here. I have the most fun job in the world!”
Now, although Alford technically keeps clinic hours, that “most fun” job keeps her busy seven days a week. “I tend to see patients after church on Sunday,” she conceded. “People who are sick will come, because they know I’m at the church. So, when church gets out, sometimes there’s a few people I have to see.”
Alford has so much work to do because many West Africans don’t have access to clean water. “Most people don’t have running water, and most homes don’t have latrines,” she explained. Clean water is hard to get and expensive. So, families may rely on infested pond water or use water for multiple purposes, exacerbating unsanitary conditions.
“It may be the whole family shares one bucket for bathing,” she said. “It means if someone has even a scratch, it can get infected. This ties into some of the wounds we see.”
Those healed wounds, as well as the clinic’s expanding capacity to provide basic medical care, represent one area of Alford’s ministry. People from not only Vogan, but across Togo and even from Ghana and Nigeria have heard the clinic’s reputation for providing excellent health care at the lowest possible cost—thanks, in part, to CBF’s support.
About half the patients come to the clinic after hospitals have failed to help them, and many more cannot afford to go anywhere else.
Alford sees manifestations of beloved community in these patients. “Some of them come for so long, and they see each other all the time, so they become friends,” she explained. “They start talking, and they start helping each other. For example, clients who have motorcycles will start picking other patients up or taking them home. They become friends and provide a support system for each other.”
Alford also provides transformational development to young people who join her staff.
“They don’t come with medical training, but it’s all about wanting to learn,” she said. “When they first come, they watch and hand us things. Then we start letting them do a little of the cleaning. And now, I stand back and monitor their work. They are so good. They’re starting to treat the wounds as I would.”
Alford and Pastor Afakule dream of “getting them off to school, where they can get a certificate,” she said. A certificate will provide the means to get a job in medicine—such as a nurse or a midwife—and then not only support their families, but also provide medical care in other villages across Togo and the region.
“What I envision is a network of practitioners all over who have been trained well and who care,” she noted. “The training is knowing it’s not just doing the bare minimum. We’ve set the standard for excellence and will guarantee patients are going to get good care. That’s one of my big dreams.”
Alford’s dreams for the young people who work alongside her dovetail with CBF’s Offering for Global Missions theme, “Behold, I am doing a new thing,” she said.
“The ‘new thing’ I would like to inspire in the people I work with is that they can do so much on their own. They have so many gifts and talents,” she explained. “They have been taught through colonialization and through poor governance that they are helpless. But I want us to teach them: ‘No, at least in health care, you have control. There are things you can do, choices you can make.’”
Whether she treats a wound herself or teaches a young protégé to treat a wound, Alford believes her opportunity to bear witness to Jesus “is showing love to people unconditionally,” she said. “It’s not judging them. It’s not trying to make them into something they’re not ready to be, but it’s loving them and holding space for them to become better versions of themselves.
“What humans need more than anything is love. They need to be loved. They need to know they are worthy, that they are good the way they are, that they have possibility, that God has designed them to do great things.”
Some of the “great things” Alford hopes the Vogan clinic will accomplish include expanding its primary care program, building a simple laboratory so the team can run basic medical tests, obtaining more and better medicines and building out its community health program.
Alford is grateful to God, her Togolese friends and CBF for coming alongside her to accomplish goals that mean generational transformation and improvement in West Africa.
“I like to be the Lone Ranger. I like to just go off and do my thing, and that has allowed me to be successful in the remote locations where I’ve worked,” she acknowledged. “But I’ve also learned you can’t do anything alone. You need others, and you need God. We can’t do anything in our own power.
“The lesson I learn every day is about deeper surrender — surrendering to God and also learning to work as a team, relying on other people. We’re not meant to do this alone.”
This story was originally published in CBF’s Fellowship! magazine. To read more stories like this one, or to subscribe to receive a print copy of the magazine, visit cbf.net/fellowship-magazine/