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Tracy Goen, M.D., bush-country veterinarian, Texan, cowboy, and missionary, wearing sunglasses and royal robes fit for Liberace, gulps a travel mug of Nescafé as his pickup trundles along a sandbar road through central Nigeria's bush. Goen's eight-year-old son, Sam, bounces in the truck bed with a generator, two bicycles, three flats of soda, duffel bags, and several hitchhikers.

In Nigeria's Kogi state, Goen practices A-to-Z surgery, handling up to 296 procedures a year—everything from craniotomies to C-sections. Prayer and caffeine fuel his nonstop pace. With his pediatrician wife, Patty, Goen has five children ranging from Elise, 17, to Katie, 4. Their cinderblock home is walking distance from the 60-bed Egbe Hospital. Patients may travel for days to arrive at Egbe for treatment.

But on this Friday morning, it's Fulani King Magaraji's turn to treat this latter-day Livingstone. Goen drives to Okoloke village, where Fulani tribal chiefs will confer a title on this white man sporting ostrich-leather cowboy boots. Goen will become Garukua Fulani Yagba West—king for life and adviser to Magaraji, the highest-ranking Fulani king of Yagbaland, the name of the local region.

Goen is running more than an hour late for his own coronation. The 44-year-old checks his watch and says: "Hey, man, we're early. This is supposed to start at 10, and now it's only 10 after 11." He gulps more coffee.

On arrival, Goen, with his white-flecked beard, hangs out the truck's window greeting people. Everybody knows pullo bodajo, the white Fulani.

In Nigeria, oral storytelling remains a principal means of communication. Local chronicles may spread like wildfire across hundreds of miles of bush country. Six years ago, stories of supernatural healings and miracles emerged from Egbe's wards. According to these accounts, prayers at Egbe Hospital, given "in the name of Jesus," resulted in miraculous healings.

The story of the Goens' road to Egbe actually begins at a Louisiana hospital, where they met as teenagers in 1980. As college students, they married in Goen's native Louisiana. Goen, to pay for his wife's medical-school tuition, took out loans and worked jobs like counting stem cells in a research lab.

After med school, Patty joined a pediatric practice and put Tracy through two years of veterinary school before he, too, opted to become a physician. Over the years, the two racked up a crushing student-loan debt of more than $100,000.

When daughter Elise turned five, she told her atheist dad and nominal-Protestant mom that she wanted to attend a school where she could learn about Jesus. Patty started taking Elise to church before enrolling her in the church's school. Then mother and daughter received Christ. A year later, at a 1994 Promise Keepers event, Tracy did, too.

"Once he got saved," Patty says, "we pursued what we were saved to do."

Over time, the Goens sensed God calling them to serve in Africa. The Goens had never met a missionary. Tracy loathed the idea of raising financial support. They learned it would take five years of work to pay off their loans. (Mission agencies avoid sending people with heavy debt overseas.) But, Patty said, once they began seeking where God wanted them to minister, "It was like a boulder rolling downhill."

Tracy traveled to Kenya for a short-term medical mission trip, and when a local Texas newspaper ran a big story on it, churches across the area asked him to speak. People wanted to know how to help get the Goens over to Africa full-time.

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November 2005, Vol. 49, No. 11