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As medical missionaries who'd spent years in some of the most troubled areas of the world, my mother and father were, in my estimation, true heroes. Both were "always abounding in the work of the Lord," and lived well into their 90s. Mother died in 1997 at age 97, and Father died three years earlier. Their gravestone in Turner Village, Maine, where my mother's parents lived, proclaims them "Servants of God."

However, in the last years of her life, my mother spoke despairingly of the family's first missionary assignment in Burma. Often, as we ended discussions about those pioneering days, she would say, "There is nothing left of our work in Burma. It was wasted effort, wasted years, all in vain." This surprised and troubled me, especially in light of Scripture, which gives us confidence that our work for the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).

Our time in Burma began in 1926, two years before my birth. That year my doctor-father, Richard S. Buker, Sr., took my mother, Minola, a nurse, and my older brother, Richard, Jr., to the border area of China and Burma.

A recent graduate of Harvard Medical School, my father had completed an internship at Walter Reed Army General Hospital before he moved the family overseas.

After taking a train to just north of Mandalay in Burma, the family traveled two weeks (300 miles) by pony through jungles, over mountains, and across the dangerous Salween River to a mission station in Yunan Province, China. They stayed there about 18 months and then recrossed the border to the Shan States of Burma, where they worked, along with my father's twin brother Ray and his wife Dorothy (both now deceased), until 1940 when World War II closed the area.

While in Burma, the family worked with the Shan, Lahu, and Wa tribes, as well as with lepers. Destitute, hurting, and unwanted (no village would allow them to live anywhere near), the first leprosy patients who came to my parents for long-term treatment ended up living under our stilt-supported house.

My father had no budget or money to undertake such an enormous burden—his salary was approximately $25 a week—but the family could not turn these people away. The patients were fed out of our rice bin. Years later, Father would often remind us that though the leprosy work grew to more than 1,000 patients, "the rice bin never went empty."

A few years after World War II, Burma essentially closed itself to missionary work. Nevertheless, Father and Mother returned to southeast Asia in 1949 to work among leprosy patients in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with outreach into Vietnam and Laos. They left in 1955, but returned again to work in Khon Kaen, Thailand, from 1964 to 1967.

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