Jenny McConnachie has brought health and hope to South Africa’s poorest for 30 years.

by Joanne O’Sullivan

If you lived in Hendersonville in the 1970s, you might have known the McConnachie house: a big, white turn-of-the-century house downtown with lots of kids running in the yard, occasional barn dances and the sound of bagpipe music wafting through the air on St. Andrew’s Day, the traditional Scottish holiday. The woman of the house, Jenny McConnachie (originally from England), was taking a break from nursing while raising her five children and fostering many others. Her husband Chris, a Scot, was an orthopedic surgeon.

The couple was active in their church—St. James Episcopal—and had a big group of friends. You could say they were a typical, successful upper-middle-class family. And then in 1981, they did something really unexpected. They packed up and moved to one of the poorest areas of South Africa. A three-month stay was followed by a one-year commitment, which later turned into five. Thirty years later, Jenny McConnachie—now 70 and a grandmother—is still there, the longest-serving missionary in the Episcopal church and the healthcare lifeline to a community ravaged by AIDS, TB and extreme poverty.

When the McConnachies arrived in South Africa, apartheid was still very much in place. It was shocking at first, Jenny says, to find divisions such as separate beaches for blacks and whites. Chris was the only board-certified orthopedic surgeon serving a population of four million, and in a hospital in the village of Bedford, the facility didn’t have air conditioning. The couple formed the nonprofit African Medical Mission as a way to help fundraise for the hospital. Their friends back in Hendersonville rallied around them with continued support, and in 2006, the couple was pronounced Officers of the Order of the British Empire because of their many years of service.

Chris died in 2007, but Jenny continues the couple’s work, focusing on the clinic she started in a community built on top of a former garbage dump: Itipini, which translates as “dump” in the local language, Xhosa. There, Jenny sees 40 to 50 patients a day, providing everything from well baby visits to taking white cell counts for AIDS patients to hospice care for the dying. All this with just one full-time assistant and a steady flow of short-term volunteers from the U.S. and other countries. In addition to the clinic, the Itipini project includes a preschool and afterschool program, a community garden and skills training programs. African Medical Mission also pays fees for local kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend elementary and high school.

While others her age may be collecting their pensions, McConnachie has no intention of stopping work. While an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence 10 years ago, she can now help people lead longer, healthier lives. Helping the younger generation overcome the poverty they were born into is another big aim. “It is very hard to look a young person in the face and say you don’t have enough money to help her go to school,” she says. There is always more need. And McConnachie always has more energy with which to meet it.

African Medical Mission’s will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a Kentucky Derby party and recognition ceremony for long-time volunteers on May 7 at 5pm at Camp Mondamin in Tuxedo. For more information, call African Medical Mission’s office at 828-696-9930 or visit www.ammsa.org.