Surgeon's work in Uganda earns Order of Canada

By Emily Wierenga  |  Special to ChristianWeek

Doctor Penny Norgrove examines a patient in Uganda. A pediatric orthopedic surgeon, Penny received the Order of Canada in fall 2007.

VICTORIA, BC—It’s one thing to go on short-term mission trip; it’s quite another for a surgeon to leave a successful Canadian practice to work for a fraction of the pay in Uganda.

It was such a sacrifice that earned Norgrove Penny, a 56-year-old pediatric orthopedic surgeon from Victoria, BC, the Order of Canada last fall.

“Dr. Penny highly deserves this prestigious award for his work over many years to provide specialist surgical services to children in Uganda suffering from club foot and poliomyelitis,” says Allen Foster, president of Christian Blind Mission (CBM). “An estimated 1.5 million children worldwide have difficulty walking because of club foot deformity which can be treated and cured.”

In 1996 Penny left a thriving business in Victoria to join CBM’s work in Uganda. Together with his wife Anné and three daughters he devoted the next six years to helping impoverished and disabled children.

“It was far more than straightening out a foot or a limb,” says Penny. “It meant a child could now go to school and hope to get a job—that a girl could hope to get married. It meant they regained their self-respect. With their disability they were looked upon as almost subhuman. In fact, their condition was seen as the result of a curse, and getting them on their feet meant that curse was broken.”

Penny performed about 1,000 operations, assisting 5,000 children each year as well as working with mission and government-run hospitals around the country and establishing a number of community-based rehabilitation centres.

He trained locals to perform a simple, non-operative procedure called the Ponseti procedure which treats clubfeet in very young children before the deformity becomes permanent.

Prior to returning to Canada in 2002, Penny set up a nationwide approach to dealing with the disability which was adopted by the Ugandan government. Endorsed by the World Health Organization, it is now being applied in a number of other countries.

“I am a follower of Jesus—that is, He is my role model,” Penny says when asked why he left his Victoria practice for a country where there were limited supplies and unreliable electricity. “A lot of the time, Jesus was healing people with chronic disabilities: the deaf, the blind and the lame, lepers, people with epilepsy.

“Jesus understood the burden they carried: they were considered cursed and untouchable. Those were like the kids I was seeing in Uganda—they were growing up disabled, isolated, considered less than human.”

The need for doctors overseas is tremendous. Penny says that while there were 10,000 pastors in Uganda, he was the only orthopedic surgeon.

Upon his return to Canada Penny was appointed pediatric orthopaedic surgeon for Vancouver Island in addition to running a practice in Victoria.

“Like Jesus, we must minister to the physical as well as to the spiritual,” Penny says. “Evangelicals sometimes reject the social gospel, but Jesus did not.”

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