Pene Key

Pene has kindly sent this "blurb" for her autobiography, a copy of which will be available for inspection, (and perhaps ordering), on Friday 9th. Pene received her OBE in 1976 for services to children in Cambodia.

Pushing the Boundaries – Memoirs of a Travelled Doctor

Pene Key’s autobiography


Dr Pene(as everyone knows her) has given us Pushing the Boundaries – Memoirs of a Travelled Doctor, through which she invites us to share her journey of forty-five years and some of her amazing experiences in different parts of the world. It is a powerful, absorbing and colourful story.

It has been my privilege to watch Dr Pene O.B.E at work in places like Dogura, a remote mission station in Papua New Guinea; and Bhubaneswar in Orissa, one of India’s poorest states; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital as it recovered from the trauma of the Pol Pot era. She was consistently authoritative, passionate and dogged. She knows her stuff, she cares deeply for the people she is serving and she sees the task through to its completion. Whatever the problems, the boundaries get pushed out. Sustained by her Christian faith, she is fearful of nobody, least of all intransigent males!

I believe there are hundreds of thousands of people on our planet who owe their quality of life, even life itself, to the health interventions and preventive systems that Pene has helped governments and other agencies put in place in the two-thirds world. Not that she has finished. As the last chapter makes clear, she is planning the next ten years, with malaria control, stroke research and more international projects in her sights.

Pushing the Boundaries is a wonderful chronicle of past adventures and achievements, but its primary purpose is about the future and the potential of the rising generations. Pene has dedicated her book to her three nieces Jane, Sophy and Helen, who are all making a significant difference in their worlds of child and family protection, veterinary medicine and the education of teenagers. She is challenging Imogen, Phoebe, Libby, Holly, Olivia, Ella, Laura, Clare and others yet unborn to rise up and push out the boundaries as they take their place as future leaders. Not to mention the many male Keys as well! There is a bright future for family chronicles.