{"id":5603,"date":"2006-09-26T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T09:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/discipleship-1.html"},"modified":"2006-09-26T09:03:10","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T09:03:10","slug":"discipleship-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/discipleship-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Discipleship"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Indianapolis: a brother and sister, both doctors, both deeply involved in serving in Africa:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Growing up in a family of 13 kids, you learn very quickly you are not the center of the universe,\u201d Ellen says. \u201cThere are all kinds of people, and you have to get along. Our parents were raised in the Church, and their faith was very important to them. They let us know we are one small part of a greater world.\u201d<\/p>\n

They both remember their father telling them and their siblings, \u201cWe are Christ, you are Christ, our neighbor is Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur parents had this notion of teaching us to live our faith and live out our faith rather than wearing it on our sleeves,\u201d Bob notes. \u201cWe are given gifts, and we have expectations to use those gifts. Those are lessons from our faith and our parents.\u201d <\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

The view looks considerably different 16 years later. With her leadership, a new hospital was built, a hospital that includes a children\u2019s pavilion and a maternity and surgical ward. She has also trained nurses, directed the building of health centers in isolated villages and opened a women\u2019s edu-cation center where women and girls learn to read, write and develop skills that can lead to an income.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 100 percent hands-on working with the people,\u201d says Ellen, now 51. \u201cI run six health centers and the referral hospi-tal for this district. I\u2019m responsible for the health care of 109,000 people in a very poor, very isolated area of Cameroon.\u201d<\/p>\n

A significant part of the funds for her efforts and the build-ing projects have come from the parish where she grew up\u2014 St. Matthew.<\/p>\n

\u201cEllen is the nearest thing to Mother Teresa I\u2019ve ever met,\u201d says Father Donald Schmidlin, a former pastor at St. Matthew. \u201cHer whole attitude of being in Africa is it\u2019s such a privilege because they welcome her willingness to help. I just admire her whole attitude and courage and skill. It\u2019s just so remarkable, and it seems to run through the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reaching out in need<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his office, Bob looks at Ellen and says that she has always set the standard for him. She is the second oldest of the 13 siblings. At 50, Bob is the third oldest. He followed her example and served in the Peace Corps in Haiti. His focus is also in Africa.<\/p>\n

Yet Bob long ago moved out of Ellen\u2019s consider-able shadow. Since the late 1980s, he has left his own distinctive mark through the IU-Kenya Partnership\u2014a partnership he helped to found, a partnership that has led to the treatment of 30,000 HIV-positive patients at 18 clinic sites in Kenya.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Indianapolis: a brother and sister, both doctors, both deeply involved in serving in Africa: Growing up in a family of 13 kids, you learn very quickly you are not the center of the universe,\u201d Ellen says. \u201cThere are all kinds of people, and you have to get along. Our parents were raised in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDiscipleship - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/discipleship-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Discipleship - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Indianapolis: a brother and sister, both doctors, both deeply involved in serving in Africa: Growing up in a family of 13 kids, you learn very quickly you are not the center of the universe,\u201d Ellen says. \u201cThere are all kinds of people, and you have to get along. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}