Dr. David Thompson, MD, FACS, FWACS
David Thompson was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1948 to Ruth and Ed Thompson, who at that time, were serving as Pastor and wife of a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church near Pittsburgh. A few months later, the Thompsons sailed to Cambodia to serve as church planting missionaries with the C&MA. David spent his childhood in Cambodia and attended the Dalat missionary boarding school in Vietnam from the first to the eleventh grade. When he was 14 years old, he saw an injured man die alongside the road in Cambodia. He was deeply troubled that he and his father were unable to either help the man medically or lead him to faith in Christ before his death. From that moment on, he began to ask God to allow him to become someone who could help the sick and dying and then share with them the good news of Jesus Christ.
During the 1968 Tet offensive, while David's parents were serving as missionaries in Vietnam and David was a pre-med student at Geneval College in Pennsylvania, his mother and father were killed by North Vietnamese soldiers as they tried to surrender to the communist forces that had overrun the city of Banmethout. A year later, David graduated from Geneva College and entered the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. During his four years in medical school, he served for three years as the student president for the CMDA chapter.
In 1971, David married Becki Mitchell, a girl he had met at the Dalat mission school in Vietnam and who had lost her father when Viet Cong forces had kidnapped him from a Leprosy hospital near Banmethuot, Vietnam where he was serving. Becki trained as a nurse and was also planning a carrer in medical missions. After graduating from medical school in 1973, David trained for two years in general surgery at Mercy hospital in San Diego.
In 1977, David and his wife accepted a call by the Christian & Missionary
Alliance to establish a new medical work in south Gabon,
in west-central Africa. In 1981, David returned to a general surgery residency
at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. He completed his
residency in 1984 and returned to work in Gabon the same year. In 1985, he
qualified for certification by the American Board of Surgery.
In the years since, David, his wife, and a team of medical colleagues transformed a small dispensary into a 110 bed, full-service hospital where tens of thousands of patients from all over the country have been helped and more than 7,000 people prayed to receive Jesus Christ. The team has also been directly involved in planting new churches.
In 1996, David help establish the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons and currently serves as PAACS Director for Africa and assistant Program Director for the PAACS program at Bongolo hospital.
Dave and his wife Becki have three children, the oldest of whom has served as a missionary in Cambodia, and several grandchildren. Dave has written three books: "On Call" (his testimony/biography), "Beyond the Mist" (the story of the church in South Gabon), and "The Hand on My Scalpel" (a collection of stories from his work).