Dr. Oliver Schmidt from Paraguay
Friday evening: The waiting room of Diospi Suyana Hospital is empty and quiet. The cleaning team also cleaned the floor and lined up the waiting benches for Monday. In the long corridor of the ambulance, a lonely man sits waiting for better times – that is, for his wife to appear and take him home.
As Dr. Martina John is still writing a medical report in her office, her husband is also drifting around the deserted Mission Hospital premises.
And then it comes to the meeting of two doctors in chairs that are usually occupied from morning to night by patient patients. Their conversation quickly turns out to be fruitful.
Although Dr. Oliver Schmidt holds a U.S. passport, he has lived and worked in Paraguay for most of his life. For the past two years, the general practitioner in “Family Medicine” has been involved with Hospital Diospi Suyana. His wife Anna, mother of four children together, helps out in the hospital’s administration. Previously, Dr. Schmidt had already invested nine years of his life in Paraguay at the “Yalve Sanga Mission Hospital” for sick people from several Indian tribes. How do you explain this concentrated load of humanity?
His grandparents, John and Clara Schmidt, moved to Paraguay from the United States to provide medical care for a Mennonite colony. Their adopted country then became the final stop for them. At the end of a long productive life, they found their burial place in the Chaco which is located in Western Paraguay.
In the 1940s, they founded the famous leprosy hospital “Kilometer 81”, which 80 years later enjoys an almost legendary reputation. In doing so, Oliver’s grandfather pursued two goals at once. On the one hand, he wanted to help the outcast leprosy patients, and on the other hand, he intended to offer young Christians meaningful employment in this medical facility. His calculation worked out perfectly. Throughout Paraguay, people speak with the utmost of respect of this work, which does not invoke the love of Christ theoretically, but rather exemplifies it year after year with conviction.
And his parents? Dr. Wesley Schmidt is considered the founder of the specialty of “Family Medicine” in Paraguay. At the Baptist Hospital in Asunción, he gave it his all – significantly supported by his wife Esther Martinez Vergara, who was also a general practitioner.
Dr. Schmidt has good role models and so it is not surprising that he himself works as a doctor for the poorest of the poor. Currently not in Paraguay like grandpa and grandma and mom and dad, but in Peru at the Diospi Suyana Hospital.
No modern influencer or rock star or slick politician can hold a candle to the fine example set by John, Clara, Wesley and Esther. In the end, it’s not clever sayings and a million likes under a post that count, but a faith lived out under hardships. Without show and without pomposity.
Dr. Oliver Schmidt is on the right track. This much can be said. And in the process, he is about to leave a valuable legacy to his own future grandchildren. /KDJ
