LAYTON — Without knowing, a patient he helped during one of his medical missions to Ghana convinced Dayne Jensen, a Utah surgeon, he needed to keep up the effort.

He had removed a tumor from the woman, and she later returned to the clinic to meet with him. He was guarded, not sure what to expect, but when she handed him a piece of fruit as a way of saying thanks, his demeanor suddenly shifted.

"That's the most that she had to give, that piece of fruit. That piece of fruit was so sacred, I almost didn't even want to eat it," said Jensen, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. "Then I was like, OK, this is the real deal. These people need to be helped. That's why we've committed to continually going back."

Ghana Make A Difference, a nonprofit based in Star, Idaho, launched in 2012 to provide aid to those in need in the impoverished nation, and Jensen first traveled to Africa to assist with its medical mission in 2015. He thought that trip would be his first and last, but the visit moved him, and he's now medical director for the organization. He travels twice a year to lead its efforts to provide free medical treatment in the west African nation, temporarily taking leave from his Davis County practice, and says he's a changed person as a result.

"I can promise I'm a better person since I've started being involved. Ghana Make a Difference has made a difference in my life, and I hope, in a small way, that I've maybe helped somebody along the way," he said in an interview from his Layton clinic.

With some 60-70 volunteers set to return to Ghana in April for the next medical outreach effort, Jensen, who lives in Huntsville, Weber County, described the group's mission and ambitions of augmenting the care it's able to provide. An Idaho couple, Cory and Stacey Hofman, founded the group after a 2012 visit to Ghana. The twice-a-year medical mission is one of its major initiatives.

Ghana Make a Difference, formed with a focus on helping children, operates a children's home and now has a surgical center as well. Teams of visiting dentists and optometrists from the United States also make regular visits to provide care, in addition to the doctors led by Jensen. "We incorporate the local doctors. We're trying to make something that's self-sustaining that can just go and go and go without us," he said.

For now, though, the major medical effort occurs each April and October when the volunteer doctors, nurses, anesthesia providers, "scrub techs" and others — using their own money — make the trip to Ghana. More than half the medical contingent typically comes from Utah, though participants come from around the globe. The coming mission goes from April 11-21.

Ghana Make a Difference's base in the African country is in Gomoa Dabanyin, a community west of Accra, the capital, near the Atlantic coast. Around 150 people are already scheduled for surgery when the team arrives for the April visit, though the volunteers will provide clinical care to more people. "It truly is the poorest of the poor," Jensen said.

The need is extensive, beyond what Jensen and his team can provide. He recalled a feeling of helplessness during one visit given the demand for medical care.

"Every day I'd stay later and longer and later and longer and later and longer, and I could see that I was making less and less and less of an impact as the time went on because more and more and more and more people showed up," he said. When he's lying awake in the middle of the night, he went on, "I don't ever see the faces of the ones that we fixed. I see the lines of people that we didn't."

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Still, the patients appreciate the care, and even if he can't single-handedly solve all the medical problems of Ghana, he'll keep at it.

"If anybody thinks of a better way, they should take that mission and run with it and try their very best to make it happen," Jensen said. "But this, what we're doing, is the best way we know how to help the people that we've come to trust and love."

To learn more about Ghana Make a Difference, visit ghanamakeadifference.org.

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