The Evangelical Medical Fellowship of India organised a conference recently in Hyderabad to recollect its fifty years of its service to medical students and doctors. It gave Anna and me an occasion to recollect our association with Drs Frank and Val Garlick, who initiated the process of the formation of EMFI in 1971.
Anna and I recollected our visit to their home in 2014. While recalling through the photos we have, two recollections stood out.
Dr Garlick offered to many of us gift of his love and presence during the five years from 1971, after he stepped down from his professorship in Surgery at CMC Vellore. He travelled wherever he felt a need to bring an encouragement to medical students and doctors and to revive a sense of call in the practice of medicine.
He fostered relationships and fellowship among those who felt the call to belong and to support each other for living an integrated life at home and work place. While back in Australia both of them were engaged in marriage enrichment workshops to foster intimacy in family life, as a continuation of their initiatives in India.
Dr Garlick's vocation was to be a pilgrim while living the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a shepherd at heart and served others to make them feel loved and affirmed. His life style of openness towards God and self giving friendship towards those he was in touch, became the seed that grew to give an ethos to the Evangelical Medical Fellowship during in its formative years.
The climate of caring and upbuilding that Dr Garlick fostered became an ambience of the EMFI during those years.
Now EMFI being in its fifties, is at an advantage to be contextual to respond to the needs of medical students and doctors which are different from what they were fifty years ago.
A tree is known by its fruits.
Let EMFI be a fruit bearing fellowship by contributing to the life of medical students and doctors to pursue practice of medicine as a calling, while staying rooted in the call of God to 'love your neighbour as yourself' !
Anna met Dr Darlick and Mrs Dr Val Garlick in 1968, when she joined for her medIcal studies at CMC Vellore. I met Dr Garlick in 1971, when he came to visit the medical students at Government Medical college at Nagpur and chose to live in the men's hostel for five days.
For both of us, knowing them was a breath of fresh air. They loved and cared spontaneously!
Dr Garlick at the end of five years had travelled about 600,000 kilometres in sleeper class in the Indian railways, to fulfil his aspiration to meet with medical students and doctors in 16 states in India. He criss-crossed the nation because he felt for students and doctors and wanted to be present to them.
While Dr Val Garlick now lives alone in Brisbane since the home call of Dr Garlick, Anna and I remember gratefully her active role in the story of formation of EMFI.
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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