Jason Fader ’99, on a team of American physicians in Burundi, will bolster his work with $500,000 from the first-ever Gerson L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service.

“Because of this prize, hundreds of people will walk, thousands will receive care, and tens of thousands will be helped by the doctors we will train,” Fader said.

The L’Chaim Prize, the largest ever in clinical care, is from the African Mission Healthcare Foundation, founded by New York entrepreneur Mark Gerson and his friend, Dr. Jon Fielder, a medical missionary serving in Kenya.

“Missionary doctors are the untold humanitarian story of our era,” said Gerson, who underwrites the prize with his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson. “Forsaking every comfort and convenience, they bring skilled, compassionate care to the continent’s poor. Across Africa, Dr. Fader and his team are a link in a string of unsung heroes.”

With the L’Chaim prize, Fader and his colleagues—serving with the agency SERGE—will add critically needed hospital beds at rural Kibuye Hope Hospital, create Burundi’s first postgraduate medical training program and expand lower-limb fracture care in a nation that travels by foot.

“It’s hard to overstate the effect,” Fader said. “In one of the world’s poorest countries, a prize of this magnitude, in one hospital, is far reaching.”

In Burundi—called the world’s hungriest nation by the World Bank—only 13 surgeons serve 10 million people. Fader and his on-the-ground team, however, have trained doctors, increased surgical procedures, and upgraded and expanded medical facilities. Every team member raises his or her financial support and has learned both French and Kirundi. Since 2013, the team has served at the Kibuye Hope Hospital, the teaching hospital for Hope Africa University Medical School.

“To move forward, to provide higher volume and better quality care, and to train more national health care workers, we have to expand the hospital,” said Fader, who intends to serve in Burundi “for many years to come.”