The Southern

CARBONDALE - Ella Phillips Lacey has spent most of her life in health care and the job has taken her around the world. Northern India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Ethiopia: Lacey called each of these countries home for at least three months each, sometimes more than once.

But the path to these exotic locales began in Carbondale. Though she was born in the small, rural community of Hayti, Mo., in 1940, Carbondale has been home to Lacey since 1960 when she came to attend college at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Since arriving here she has earned bachelor's and master's degrees, raised four children and dedicated herself to health care.

Shortly after receiving her master's in 1972, Lacey began working at SIU's School of Medicine as a field consultant, where she made an early impact in how the people of Southern Illinois receive their care.

"Back then, the ambulance of the day was a hearse," she said. "Funeral homes provided the service. But, with the new medical school, the dean felt it was in the best interest of the community to have vehicles more focused on emergency services."

So her job became focused on writing grant proposals and sitting in on city, county and other local government meetings in the hopes of securing funding. And, when she was done, she had helped bring five ambulances to Southern Illinois.

Other initiatives would follow, including a program in which doctors learned from nurses inside the homes of patients and a program teaching medical students more effective ways to interview.

"Then one day in about 1991 or 1992, I looked at things and I realized I could retire, and I actually did in 1994," she said. "By that point I had been employed from age 17 to 54, so I retired from SIU medical school."

But Lacey had plans for her retirement and she said they didn't involve sitting still.

"Well, actually, my son was worried that, if I retired, I'd sit around and grow old early," she said with a laugh. "About a year before I retired I'd applied for the Peace Corps."

But she hesitated to tell her family of her plans.

"I thought my children would think something was gone wrong with me," she said. "In March of 1995 I got my assignment and that July I left."

She landed in the African nation of Malawi, where she served as a child survival specialist in a public health unit, walking three miles to work every day. Lacey said her work consisted mostly of training those who helped to train volunteers in the fight against polio.

"I trained the trainers," she said of her work.

Malawi would be the first of many countries she would visit, first with the Peace Corps and then with STOP (Stop Transmission of Polio) through the Centers for Disease Control.

Before being forced to quit because of age restrictions that capped a volunteer's age at 62, Lacey went to Sierra Leone. It was, she said, the most difficult place to work.

"It was the toughest," she said, of her time there in 2005, a few years after the country's bloody civil war. "Seeing so many people who had one arm and one leg and seeing them begging. It wasn't just the severed limbs; I've seen that. But there was very little hope for them."

Today Lacey spends a great deal of her time volunteering with the Rotary Club and she says she's got other plans.

"I have applied to be a United Nations volunteer, and that could take me anywhere in the world," she said. "I am under consideration right now; there is much more screening to go on before I am assigned. I've also applied for volunteer for the Water Crisis Corps, which provides expertise to places that need basic water and sanitation."

It doesn't sound like retirement and Lacey says she likes it that way.

"I see no reason to slow down. It doesn't do anything for the soul."

blackwell.thomas@thesouthern.com / 351-5823