Unlike most mothers and grandmothers, Cindy Epps, an assistant professor of nursing at the State University of West Georgia, will not be celebrating Mother's Day with her family this Sunday. Following church services at Christ the King Church in Peachtree City, Mrs. Epps will embrace her husband, sons and grandchildren and rush to the airport to board an aircraft bound for the east African nation of Uganda.

This will be Epps' third trip to Uganda i as many years. During this journey, she will be instructing student nurses at the government-run school of nursing in Jinja, Uganda, the second largest city in the nation.

Health care is a major problem in Uganda, which records the largest occurrence of AIDS/HIV in the world. The disease is so prevalent that travelers have been advised to assume that anyone they may meet carries the virus.

The nation is also plagued with other tropical diseases and suffers from poor sanitation, contaminated water and a lack of medical care said to be horrifying.

Village clinics are often run by nurses who battle poor facilities and a lack of medicine. Clinics in outlying villages often have no electricity, no running water, and a scarcity of beds. Ill patients often find themselves sleeping on the floor of the clinic. Many of the nursing students Epps will instruct may eventually be sent to these remote areas.

In previous visits to Uganda, Epps served as a member of a team that took medication and care to several of these remote villages. She says she returned from those trips “haunted by the faces of the old people and the smallest children,” many of whom were dying despite the best efforts of the team. One thin, elderly woman, after receiving medical care, fell to her knees, wept, and kissed Epps hand repeatedly as she expressed her gratitude in her tribal language. Epps says it was an embarrassing and humbling moment for her. “It is a remembrance that propels me back to Africa,” she said.

Once known as the “pearl of Africa,” Uganda is still recovering from the reign of Dictator Idi Amin. Soldiers in battle dress uniforms still patrol the streets of the nation's cities, armed with machine guns. Violence against Westerners is an ever-present threat.

But it is the great need, Epps says, that continues to call and beckon her, and people like her—commissioned medical missionaries in their denominations—back to Africa. “These student nurses could be a key to the future survival of people in the outlying areas,” she adds.

And so, for the moment, for Epps, the Mother's Day celebration will just have to wait.

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