Throughout her life, Tarbiye Pela, MD, has followed her heart which has led her to mission work, medicine and kids. Whether she is working to educate mothers about HIV in Nigeria, being a mother to her four children or taking care of her patients at Jackson Pediatric Center, missions are at the heart of what she does.
Growing up in Nigeria, Pela came from a family where attending college was not a common practice. In fact, she was the first grandchild in her family to go to college. While she had initially planned at an early age to follow in her father’s footsteps and become an engineer, it was her father who steered her toward medicine. “I had wanted to do engineering since I was about eight, but back then it was not a good career for women,” said Pela. “In Nigeria, if you were smart growing up you became a lawyer or a doctor. When I was 12, my dad insisted that medicine was the career for me. Around the age of 15, I finally agreed and it has turned out that it was what I was meant to do.”
In 1997, at the age of 17, Pela entered the University of Ilorin’s medical program. “It is a six-year program in which the first three are the pre-medical portion then you move into the medical school part,” she said. “Because Nigeria was colonized by the British, our educational system is very British based and our primary medical schools are tied to Cambridge, so many of the professors are British. In the 1980’s, American trained professors started infiltrating the medical schools. In fact, most of the pediatric faculty were American trained.”
In Nigeria, when medical students finish their education they are required to complete a house job, a British term for a one-year internship. Then they are qualified to enter the workforce. Pela began her house job at the University of Jos (Unijos) in central Nigeria in January 1994. “Once you complete your house job, you are a fully licensed general practice/family physician,” she said. “You then can choose if want to complete a residency then or complete your mandatory one year of service to the Nigerian government. As a doctor you can work in any of the local hospitals or health centers to meet this requirement. I stayed at Unijos to complete my year of service.”
After her year of service, Pela felt led to continue to serve others through missionary work. She remained in Jos and worked with a program that cared for women involved in the commercial sex industry (prostitution) and their children. The ministry included not only medical care, but also supported a home for the women who wanted to leave the profession. “They were provided with vocational training to help them start a new life,” said Pela. “We also ministered to them.”
In the mid-1990’s AIDS had become a big issue in Nigeria and for Pela, another mission field. “A lot of what we did then was education/prevention-based since treatment options were pretty non-existent at the time,” she said. “When we had a positive pregnant patient, we encouraged them to not breastfeed because the virus could be transmitted in the breastmilk. Throughout my two and half years there we only had two positive moms come through. I even ended up fostering one child whose mom was HIV positive from birth until the age of six.”
Pela moved to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, to help her mother. While she continued to work and campaign on the side for HIV education and prevention programs, she resumed the practice of medicine as a family practitioner.
In 1999, Pela met the man who six months later would become her husband. “He was an American who was in Nigeria working on a project funded by the state of California. It was through his job that we met,” she said. “I became the HIV/AIDS coordinator for UNICEF and when we got married I had to decide whether to continue with my job or move to the United States. After spending two and a half years commuting back and forth, I quit my job with UNICEF and moved to the U.S.”
With pediatrics long in her heart, Pela decided to pursue it in America. “In order to apply for a pediatric residency, I would have to take all the exams medical school students do before starting their residency,” she said. “In order to help me prepare, I utilized programs such as Kaplan to help me study. It took me about six years to finish taking all my exams necessary, but I also had four kids during the same time. In 2009, I began my pediatric residency at Loma Linda Medical Center in California.”
In 2012, as Pela completed her residency, her husband retired from his job with the state of California after 20 years. “He really wanted to move to the East Coast but that was not where I wanted to raise our kids,” said Pela. “I looked at jobs in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Once I came to Jackson, I knew it was the right place. I joined the staff at Jackson Pediatric Center and my husband started his own company.”
Pela says there was something about Jackson that appealed to her. “I think anyone can learn to like a place,” she said. “But I think there are just things that are
unique to this area that make this place great. Jackson is more laid back and people know one another. People feel like this place belongs to them. It is their hometown, their village if you will, and they love being here. It is like no one really wants to leave except maybe to go on vacation. Being from Nigeria, that really appeals to me.”
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