Episcopal Lives:
Wayne Centrone: Healer in faith
By Deirdre Steinberg
Dec 1, 2005, 17:06

Dr. Wayne Centrone in front of a mural at Outside/In, a medical social service agency for Portland’s homeless youth. Centrone is the director of medical outreach.

Over the past several months, the media has reported continuously on emergency relief efforts for victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the South India tsunamis. Emergency relief work is infused with intensity and a sense of immediacy—and we respond almost instantly and with utmost generosity.

But what about the kind of relief work that is not an emergency, the kind of help that centers on the relentless sorrows of the wretchedly poor, who are hungry, ill, uneducated and, especially, without hope, all of their days?

This kind of relief work is at the core Dr. Wayne Centrone’s life. The 38-year-old physician has traveled more than 20 times over the past decade to Peru, most recently with fellow congregants from Christ Church, Lake Oswego. There, he and his colleagues and congregants tend not only to the bodies of the chronically poor, but also to their souls. He has been accompanied on many of these “Team Peru” trips by his wife, Lee, 35, who owns an insurance management business.

“We certainly aren’t evangelizing,” insists Centrone, who is the medical director for outreach at Outside/In, a social service agency serving Portland’s homeless street youth. “It’s medical missionary work.” What that means, he says, is approaching poverty and its attendant horrors (hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, domestic violence, chronic mental illness, etc.) as interrelated and long-term problems that require the coordinated and sustained efforts of healthcare workers, social workers, economic development specialists, and governmental agencies in the affected countries over a period of several generations. “It’s slow and involves continued and sustained commitment over a very long haul, but it must happen,” says Centrone.

“The majority of the communities we serve are at the lowest socioeconomic quartile (25th percentile),” he explains. “This means that people don’t have access to potable water, healthcare, and basic nutrition. These people can’t get their calorie needs met and have no hope for finding jobs. Many of these families exist on less than $2 (U.S.) per day – and that’s often for a family of eight.”

Centrone does not do his work alone. Right from the start, he hooked up William Clark, a missionary working with Peru’s Union Biblica, which provides outreach to homeless boys. He also works with Alto Cayma Cener, run by a Catholic missionary, Father Alex.

On a recent medical outreach trip to Peru, Centrone took a clinic to mountain towns in the southern Andes, almost 4,000 meters above sea level. He and his co-workers hiked from village to village, carrying their medical supplies on the backs of burros. “Our focus was to reach the most inaccessible people in the world,” says Centrone. “Our goal was to show them that people care.”

Centrone and his wife have founded Health Bridges International to “cross over and reach out” by creating medical and social service partnerships between healthcare workers and organizations in the United States and those in developing nations. These partnerships will lead, it is hoped, to sustainable health systems in the Third World.

“I feel that I have been profoundly ‘called’ to this life, to be a witness to the poor and forgotten. I am a child of God and as such, I am charged with loving all of God’s creations. When people are committed to live in community – responsible for one another’s welfare and well-being —all things are possible.”

Centrone grew up in a family of “Catholic religious do-gooders,” who instilled in him the desire to “become a steward of something bigger than myself.” His father, John Centrone, died in an airplane crash, when his son was only 19. John Centrone had worked with needy people in his community in the Florida Panhandle. Wayne Centrone’s mother, Lynn Centrone, also set an example through her advocacy for the homeless. His parents were “huge” influences on his life, says Centrone. “I knew as a child that I wanted to be a medical missionary,” he says.

His Episcopal faith has been a constant source of inspiration. (Centrone jokes that when he married Lee, she was a Presbyterian and he was a Catholic; it was mandatory for them to become Episcopalians.) “I feel that my work is not only condoned but advocated by my church.

“As Episcopalians, we are stewards of the other,” he maintains. “We show people that they are loved, without condition, but for just being what we all are: human beings in need.”

For more information on Health Bridges International and Team Peru, email Wayne Centrone at centronewl@comcast.net