Wendy Willmore ’98 heard God’s call to missionary service at a very young age. For this inspiring 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award winner, ĚÇĐÄSwag provided a liberal arts education grounded in a Christian worldview, including a highly impactful missions minor, that continues to inform her thoughts as she serves as a surgeon in Tanzania.
“ĚÇĐÄSwag was definitely a good spot on the path and I think there are very few places that would have prepared me nearly as well as my ĚÇĐÄSwag education did,” says Willmore. “To be able to have the foundation of how to think with a Christian worldview was invaluable.”
With a bachelor of science from ĚÇĐÄSwag and a doctor of medicine from Queen’s University in hand, she headed to Newfoundland for her residency at Memorial University. She would eventually stay in the province to assist with a crisis happening in a rural community there. That community provided the grounding and encouragement, as well as the funds to pay off medical school debt, to help her get on her feet. But a few years later, she began to hear God’s voice reminding her that she had promised to go to the mission field.
“I was very comfortable in my little rural hospital in Newfoundland. I had a church that I loved … I loved the people I was working with and it was difficult to leave.” She says she relates to how Jonah must have felt when God told him to go to Nineveh and he really didn’t want to go. “It became more and more uncomfortable.”
It wasn’t immediately clear where God was calling her to go, but a faculty member from her time at Queen’s who was also a missionary, connected her with the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons. She eventually arrived in Tanzania by what she calls “divine accident.” When plans fell through with an initial opportunity, she needed somewhere to go. Ultimately, the director who would become her missionary mentor welcomed her to come to Arusha Lutheran Medical Center in Arusha, Tanzania. Within months, the chief of surgery asked her to start a new general surgery residency program there. Despite her protests that she was too young and didn’t have enough surgery experience, she sought God’s direction and in 2013 moved to Arusha long term under Commission to Every Nation, an interdenominational missionary cooperative.
Willmore says the building blocks for the surgical education program at the hospital were all in place when she arrived. “I was the final piece.” She launched the program in partnership with her national colleagues and the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons and co-directed it until 2021.
“To be able to have the foundation of how to think with a Christian worldview was invaluable.”
At that time, she felt God calling her to her next assignment. After spending some time in the field in central Tanzania, northern Zimbabwe and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, she eventually returned to Nkinga, a small community in Tabora region, Tanzania, to lay the ground work for a second surgical residency program at Nkinga Referral Hospital, a partnership with the Free Pentecostal Church in Tanzania.
Willmore describes the residency program as a two-track program; she teaches the necessary academics and the hands-on surgical training, but also spends time on the softer skills. “[T]here’s also that mentorship, training someone to fill your own shoes, to study the Word, to be the hands of Christ, to let his compassion shine through your eyes and to be a witness, along with the rest of that hospital community, to the power of the resurrection as it breaks into the darkness in which we all find ourselves.”
In small-town Tanzania, darkness often comes in the form of poverty and inequity. Many of all ages, but especially children with surgical disease, would go home to die were it not for the care of Willmore and her colleagues as they cannot afford to travel elsewhere for care. She sees these inequities and longs to bring God’s love and justice to the people of Nkinga.
“One of the things that burns missionary doctors out early is that feeling that you have to fix it. [You must learn] that you are not God, you are only his servant … you do what he gives you the power to do and you leave the rest in his hands. [That] is something I think that most Western physicians struggle to understand and deal with. We bring order and justice because Christ has sent us to do that. But we are not God himself and we have much to learn.”
One of the really great things about the peripatetic life is that feeling of homelessness. You realize you don’t really belong anywhere. You were made for another country.
Willmore also knows and experiences the privilege of walking with people who are suffering and in pain. She sees the way illness, injury and disability can open doors to serving people not just physically, but spiritually as well.
“Prayer is the most powerful weapon that I have. In Tanzania, that’s the easiest thing because although it’s a secular society, over 98 per cent believe in God and most of them still understand that it’s God who has the power to heal … you’d be amazed at how much theology you can get into a prayer.”
As Willmore once again awaits permits to re-enter Tanzania after having travelled back and forth from Canada to Africa throughout much of her life, she reflects on how this lifestyle has shaped her and taught her that heaven is her true home.
“I’m so mobile in my life. I’m a traveller and that’s mostly by necessity … One of the really great things about the peripatetic life is that feeling of homelessness. You realize you don’t really belong anywhere. You were made for another country … Nowhere feels like home anymore. What a great gift that is.”