07674
October 19, 2007

Missionaries’ role is to work selves ‘out of a job’

PC(USA)’s de la Torre says collaboration with local partners should lead to self-sustainability

by Toya Richards Hill
Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE — Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker Dr. Salvador de la Torre eventually expects to lose his job, and he’s OK with that.

In fact, that’s been his goal at each post he’s been assigned to over 29 years of service as a PC(USA) missionary.

“Our job is to work ourselves out of a job,” he told the Presbyterian News Service recently. The goal is to mentor and develop the skills of local partners so that the mission co-worker is not needed, de la Torre said.

So from Haiti, where he first started out in the late 1970s, to Kenya, where he and his wife, Irma, are currently assigned, that’s been de la Torre’s plan.

Irma and Salvador de la Torre are currently in the United States telling their story as part of Mission Challenge ’07, a month-long effort by the PC(USA)’s Presbyterian World Mission office to spread the denomination’s global witness story in at least 144 of the 173 presbyteries in the United States and Puerto Rico.

A physician by trade, de la Torre has spent nearly three decades laboring in the mission field because, simply, “we have a call to serve” and “to make a difference.”

“It’s a good fit” for him and Irma, a nurse whose current role includes working with HIV/AIDS orphans and with women’s guilds to develop day care centers for vulnerable children, he said.

De la Torre’s service over the years has included providing teaching and clinical expertise at hospital and universities, always working collaboratively with local partners, he said.

“I’m a physician who works in partnership,” he said. “Mission co-workers are changing lives working together with partners.”

Currently, de la Torre’s work includes helping impact the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. As project manager for a U.S. government-sponsored aid program for people with HIV/AIDS, de la Torre assists close to 10,000 HIV/AIDS patients with getting essential medicines and equipment.

“Every year we add more hospitals and more patients to the program,” he said.

Program components also include preventing mother-to-child HIV/AIDS transmission and educating adolescents about sexual and reproductive health, de la Torre said.

“Every single pregnant mother must be tested,” he said of the mother-to-child transmission prevention effort. Then if positive, at the time of delivery both the mother and the child are given anti-retroviral therapy, de la Torre added.

The children, “if properly treated … will grow up to be adults,” he said.

Eventually, if de la Torre’s edict about the role of mission co-workers holds true, he will have worked himself out of his job. And, he said, that’s as it should be.

“We have to be flexible,” de la Torre said. “It’s about shifting tasks, changing roles, working in partnership.”

During Mission Challenge ’07, Salvador and Irma de la Torre are itinerating in the presbyteries of Charlotte and Southeastern Illinois.