No one in my life exemplifies the beauty of giving back to a community like the nuns at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. They left the comfort of their Luxembourgian communities at 18, and travelled without hesitation to Malawi, Africa. Two years ago, these three nuns celebrated 50 years of service to this foreign community that has become their own. Freely hardly describes the sentiment of their service. What they give to their community was more than simply free – it is full of love, joy, compassion, and gratitude. They have abandoned the comforts of their community to pour into a foreign and abandoned village without hesitation or expectation that the community will return to them what they have sacrificed.

These nuns live out the beauty of charity with the utmost integrity and importance, carefully including this belief in every small decision. When I travel to the hospital, I am very careful not to take from the community – as tourists so often do. I am there to give, not to take. So, when my mom became sick and in desperate need of antibiotics, I could hardly bear the thought of asking the Sisters for a few pills from their precious supply of medicines. As I accepted the bag of pills – more than the hospital could afford to give away – I tried to repay the Sister with a few kwatcha. I will never forget what she said to me in that moment. “Please, don’t…” she said, refusing the kwatcha, “We owe each other too much.”

We owe each other too much. How truly that statement rang in my heart, and how beautiful the dynamic was proven to be. During the five years that my family has been serving the hospital, we have grown into a community that truly owes each other far too much not to serve each other freely.

This is my hope for the future – that I will practice medicine in a community that I have learned to serve freely, and that I expect nothing from in return. I understand deeply the importance and value in serving a community freely. This is just as important for a physician as it is for one of the Sisters, for the patients they serve, for the manufacturer that freely donated the drugs, for the priest that prays at the beds of every patient, for the maid that changes the sheets, and for the volunteer that receives the antibiotics. We all owe each other far too much not to return freely what we have been given.