How My Career in Healthcare Took Its Show on the Road–Overseas

In Go. Serve. Love’s passion to help you navigate a path overseas, we believe marketplace missions has 4.13 billion beautiful reasons for you to consider doing your career (yes, that one) overseas. So we’re psyched to welcome Sarah Galloway, nurse practitioner, wife, and mom, who’s recently moved her job overseas with the help of Scatter Global.

Scatter helps you find a job and live on mission where Jesus is not known. (See? Isn’t that cool?) 

Check out Sarah’s story.

By Sarah Galloway, Nurse Practitioner in the Middle East

My desire to work internationally had been germinating for years.

In 2013, my husband Steve and I hauled our kids to Kenya for six months when he received a grant.

Later, I had the chance to take nursing students from the university where he worked back to Kenya for their global experience.

I was a nurse; Steve was a music professor. After 18 years in Ohio, I found myself working for the United States Border Patrol as a travel nurse, responding to a lot of COVID cases in 2020 and into this year.

So, there I was, experienced and well-traveled and willing, wanting to be the international nurse practitioner I felt God was leading me to be.

Trouble was, nobody was looking for nurse practitioners.

Nurse practitioners tend to function more like physicians than the registered nurses they are — diagnosing patients, creating treatment plans, prescribing medication. So it’s outside the accepted norm for most healthcare communities around the world.

The more I asked medical ministries, “Could you use a nurse practitioner?” the more everyone said no. They wanted doctors, physicians’ assistants, dentists, physical therapists. Just about every specialty except mine.

Until 2019.

YES. YOU CAN DO THIS CAREER IN HEALTHCARE OVERSEAS

That year, at the Global Missions Health Conference (picture thousands of people, all talking about a career in healthcare and Christian ministry—two of my deepest passions), I looked at the conference program and saw the summary for Scatter Global’s presentation on marketplace workers.

There before lunch, a friend and I walked into the room and could barely find a seat. It was that packed.

And while she was interested, I was absorbed. The more I heard, the more excited I got.

As I listened, I couldn’t believe how closely Scatter Global’s vision of sending workers into the international marketplace as ambassadors for Jesus resonated with my own.

Steve and I have long shared a belief in the very thing that I was having affirmed in the strongest possible way: that we should minister in the name of Jesus while doing our jobs (in our case, nursing and teaching) and getting paid to do those jobs.

I was way too excited to just sit and eat. I hurried over to Scatter Global’s booth in the exhibition space. And I asked the same question I’d been asking for years.

But instead of the same answer, I heard, “Oh, yeah! We really would like to use nurse practitioners.” [su_pullquote align=”right”]My husband and I have long shared the belief we should minister in the name of Jesus while doing our jobs and getting paid to do those jobs.[/su_pullquote]

That lit a fire in me–and culminated in my new job at a hospital in the Middle East, where we have lived for the last few months.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Scatter Global started by asking me, “Where do you want to go?”

My husband, Steve, and I share a conviction that where God leads you, that’s where you go. Not, “I have to go to Australia, because, well, I’ve always wanted to.”

We began by searching for possibilities in one Southeast Asian country. They weren’t interested in nurse practitioners (no surprise there).

We then looked at a country in the Middle East (not our current one). Same story. We tried another country that we planned on visiting until COVID shut us out. That lead, too, fizzled.

Finally, in June 2020, on a providentially slow day, a Scatter Global leader who’s proven to be instrumental in our journey texted me:

Can you Zoom right now?

OK, sure.

I got on the call. And all of a sudden, I was talking with an executive in the hospital system that I now work for.

From that day on, we were pursuing our current country–and transferring my career in healthcare to a context where Jesus isn’t yet known.

Of course, we know that God has directed it all. But the Scatter Global team has also stuck with us and helped us at every step. They steered me from brushing up my LinkedIn page to mock interviews to simply answering questions when the process slowed to a crawl.

And that’s made every ounce of difference.

When I got the job offer in April of 2021, we’d been doing some helpful training on the side with Scatter Global partners. Then, other staff kicked into paperwork mode. They worked with my employer to make sure they had everything they needed to make this happen.

Never Alone

Settling into a new culture and adopting a completely new cultural context for a career in healthcare hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park. But having our Scatter Global teammates walk alongside us before, during and after our arrival? That’s situated us for success in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

And with that help, the stressors of the process and the move truly have drawn us closer as a couple in many ways.

We’re only a couple of months into this gig. I know big challenges will come and threaten to knock us sideways. But with the Lord’s guidance and the understanding involvement of our team, we’ll be ready.

Interested in checking out Scatter Global, whether you have a career in healthcare…or something totally unrelated? Check ’em out. 

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