In The Season Of Giving, Looking To Help Neighbors Near And Far

PORTLAND, OR —The images are very clear for Martha Newsome, even as she sits 7,000 miles away in her home in southeast Portland. She can easily picture the teenager lying in her bed in the maternity ward, having just given birth the day before, with the teen’s grandmother by her side. The baby, a girl, is a first for the teen, whose name is Umazahan.

People who know her just call her “Uma.”

The ward is in the “Football Field Primary Health Care Clinic.” It’s one of five clinics run by Portland-based Medical Teams International in a Bangladeshi refugee camp that is home to more than 1 million Rohingya who had fled genocide in Myanmar.

The camp is both sprawling — it’s in what used to be an elephant reserve — and cramped. Homes of bamboo sticks and tarps are built back to back, so small that they make the notion of a “shack” seem luxurious, and are crammed together. It may be the largest refugee camp in the world, and it provides a steady stream of between 80 and 100 patients to the clinic each day.

Newsome is the executive director of MTI, which not only runs the five clinics in the Bangladeshi camp but also ones in refugee camps around the world. They also provide free dental care to homeless and low-income families in the United States unable to afford it.

She met Uma on a recent trip to the Bangladeshi camp. The teen was in one of the clinic’s two beds dedicated to new moms recovering after having given birth.

Uma has been in the camp for two years. The oldest of seven children, all of whom had been born at home, Uma had been reluctant to go to the camp’s medical center.

After three days of labor, she was finally convinced to go.

Newsome believes that Uma helps show that, whether someone is halfway around the world or next door, we are all neighbors.

“Refugees are just like you,” she says. “They’re just like me. They need our help, and they need our support. They need our solidarity.

“They need us to care.”

Newsome says that it’s when you hear the stories of people like Uma, “especially in this season of giving, it just reminds me personally how incredibly blessed we are here, how so often we don’t even realize it.

“When you think about it, Jesus was a child born to refugees, and we romanticize his story," Newsome said. "We hold up what he did for others as the model for how we should we live our lives, yet we so often turn away."

Her Father’s Footsteps

The way Newsome tells it, the work she does with Medical Teams International, and the work that she did before that, have all been somewhat inevitable.

“My dad was a doctor with the Army, and there was a lot of traveling,” she said. “The one thing that was consistent as we moved around was watching him help people. I knew that was something that I wanted to do.

“I’ve always wanted to help — work with people.”

When her dad died when she was 12, that feeling became stronger.

“The thing is,” she said, “I discovered that while I was wired like him in wanting to help, I was not wired to become a doctor.”

She points to organic chemistry as one hurdle.

Newsome ended up getting a master's degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health after having studied at Wheaton College.

That eventually led her to World Vision, an organization similar in mission to MTI.

She spent 15 years in Africa for that group, most of it in Mozambique during that country’s civil war.

Newsome’s time in Africa — where her two children, one now 20 and the other 23, spent much of their lives growing up — gave her a perspective that drives her life today.

“You never want to forget what you see,” she says. “At the same time, you always need to be aware of how things are. It’s something that I’ve always tried to keep at heart, how I live in this world where there are so many in the need of so much while, at the same time, my children can grow up well taken care of.

“I’ve tried to raise them aware of how while they are blessed, there are those who have not been so fortunate.”

Streets of Portland

That lesson, that idea, followed Newsome and her family back to the United States and the streets of southeast Portland, where she now lives.

“You never want to lose sight of the fact that wherever you live, there are people who need help,” she said. “Even here in Portland, there’s people right under our noses that are also in crisis.”

Newsome says that Medical Teams International has focused its efforts at home — not just in Portland but around Oregon, Washington and other parts of the United States — on people who need dental care but can’t afford it.

“There’s a lot of talk about people who don’t have health insurance,” she said. “And, rightly so. But when you add in the people without dental coverage, that number doubles.

“These are people in pain, people we pass every day but may not see. These people are in crisis and need our help as well.”

As A Mother, As A Person

Newsome returns to the subject of Uma.

“She didn’t want to come to the clinic when it was time to give birth,” Newsome said. “She had been born at home, her mother and her siblings had been born at home. They grew up without access to medical care, and there was an absence of trust.

“That’s something different than what you see here. People know about medical care but simply just don’t have access to it.”

For Uma, the distrust led to her going through three days of difficult labor before she finally let people bring her to the clinic. There, she gave birth to a baby girl, and both are doing fine.

“As a mother, as a person, you see things like that. Then you see people in crisis here at home, and you just want to advocate for those people,” Newsome said. “You want to help them, do what you can.

“It’s important to have gratitude for what you have, to know that you are blessed and to want to pass on that blessing to others.”

Newsome says knowing that you can make a difference, that you can help others, is a strong feeling that keeps her and others from growing too despondent, too overwhelmed by what they see: nearly 71 million refugees around the world and tens of millions of more who just need help.

“You have to have a balance,” she said. “You can’t help everybody, but you can help people. And knowing that, for me, for our staff in Uganda, for the people at the clinics in Bangladesh, and the people here at home, helping those people is what it’s about.

“It’s what gets us out of bed, every day.”