Frank Ogden

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me,
I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.
Matthew 25:35,36

Frank came to Burundi in 1970, after finishing his surgical training. He didn’t speak much French at the time, but was eager to serve, and his family settled into a small home at Kibuye, a remote site in the highlands of central Burundi.

He has spent most of his surgical career at Kibuye, interrupted only by times of war and by his first wife Maxine’s battle with terminal cancer. On several occasions when Burundi was unstable and violent, he moved to a hospital in nearby Rwanda, serving there until things settled down.

Now retired and remarried, Frank and his wife Carol return to Burundi for a few months nearly every year, taking on a busy surgical load, assisting the Burundian doctors who now work at the hospital, and encouraging the staff.

If you spent a day with Frank, you would see his compassion in the way he treats patients and hospital workers. One day as we travelled to a remote dispensary, he filled every seat of his van with people who needed to get somewhere else, including a very sick young woman who needed treatment elsewhere for her drug-resistant TB.












In 1972, when Burundi erupted in ethnic violence, Frank put his friend Wakana, a young Tutsi man, under the back seat of his truck, with a few cases of CocaCola on top, and drove though more than a dozen checkpoints on the way to Congo and then safety for Wakana in Rwanda.

While Kathy and I were staying at Kibuye, an amazing thing happened: Wakana returned to Burundi for the first time in 38 years, for an emotional reunion with people and places he’d left long ago.

Frank has had to tackle a few problems along the way, and you can find many evidences of his work and creativity at Kibuye. For example, the national power grid is unreliable, making it difficult to do surgery with inadequate light. So he assembled an automobile headlight with a 12 volt solar and battery system to illuminate the surgical field.


Today, most of the homes and buildings of Burundi are constructed with bricks. To help the hospital building program, and to provide a supply of bricks and roofing tiles for houses in the community, Frank built a kiln for firing bricks and roofing tiles. No longer in use, the facility produced large quantities of quality building materials for many years.

Years ago, in response to severe malnutrition among the children living in remote Burundian villages, Frank took an existing nutritional program and made it his own, even better than before. Today, tons of Busoma (made of maize, soy, sorghum, and a little sugar - all grown locally) are shipped to nutrition programs around the country every year, helping to sustain poor and hungry families.

Frank is a legend and a hero to many in Burundi. In recent years, a new medical school has opened at Hope Africa University in Bujumbura, training a new generation of doctors.


Fittingly, the school is named after Frank, and while we were there, the initial group of medical students arrived at Kibuye for their very first clinical training. I made sure they know what a privilege it is for them to learn from Dr. Ogden’s vast clinical experience.

Frank may not be able to return to Burundi many more times, though I encouraged him to procure a UW doctoral hood and be there in 2013 for the commencement ceremony of the first graduating class of the medical school that is named after him.

He has faithfully served the Lord and the people of Burundi, and though others will take his place, no one will ever truly replace him.

- Doug