Dunedin-born Major Ferguson's stories about the tragedies and triumphs of a no-frills life spent mainly in remote and impoverished villages were begging to be written down.
Three years of Rudd's "spare time" later, the result is No River Uncrossable, a self-published volume released earlier this month.
Here is an extract.
Not all the work was plain sailing and my experience with one patient stands out, a teacher who came to us for her antenatal care.
It was her first baby and was obviously a big one, so I told her she should go down and have the baby at the Government hospital where they could do more for her if there were any complications.
We knew when we could deal with people and when we should refer them on to a bigger facility, but we couldn't force them to go.
This woman knew that. On the day she went into labour, instead of going in the market car to the hospital she hid until the car had left.
She came to us quite late in the evening in the second stage of labour, already pushing.
She was becoming weak. The baby was in the right position for a normal delivery but it was too big.
We had a major problem. It was impossible by that stage to take her down the mountain, as there were no vehicles in our village and to get a vehicle we would have had to send someone down the mountain to the next village on foot or on a motorbike.
Then there was no guarantee there would be a vehicle available.
On top of that, the baby's heartbeat was slowly changing, a sign that it was becoming distressed.
My nurse assistant and I knew we had to deliver the baby ourselves.
This was just what we did not need, as it was the end of a long day of work for us both.
We had had several broken nights before that and were both desperately tired.
The nurse with me that night was a student who had come from our training school in Surabaya to do her practical training.
She decided she would try and push on the mother's abdomen to help the baby out, but she wasn't very big and it was pretty ineffectual.
She was using all her strength but in the end she gave up.
I was balancing on a little set of steps trying to get the baby's head born safely.
When the nurse couldn't push any more, I had to use my left hand to put a little bit of extra pressure above the womb.
We thought if we could give the mother some extra oomph the baby might come.
I said to the mother, "Push, push!" She replied, "It's your job to deliver the baby.
Get it done!"One of the other nurses went down and talked to the Salvation Army captain's wife - she and her husband were the corps officer's assistants.
She called in some Home League ladies, most of whom were related to the mother. They started to pray.
I notified the woman's family that I was anxious about the delivery.
I had never lost a mother or baby in childbirth in all the deliveries I had done and all the places I had been, but this night I doubted my capabilities.
Eventually I managed to get the head safely delivered - how I don't know. But then came the shoulders.
The baby was very big, and no matter what I did I could not get the shoulders born.
I knew if I could get one shoulder out the rest of the baby would follow, but it just wasn't happening.
All I could say as I was pouring with perspiration, one hand under the baby's chin and the other hand trying to push the baby out, was "God help me".
I knew people were praying in the background, but I was scared.
I was just about to give up. The baby's face was slowly turning black.
I knew there was one more thing I could do and that was to break the baby's collarbone to collapse the shoulders.
But I knew that if I did that, there would be very every likelihood the child would be handicapped.
Also, I was concerned about damaging the baby's blood vessels.
As I continued the struggle, I literally felt hands on mine. I knew it was the hands of God.
That hand on my left hand gave me an extra strength, and somehow the baby was born.
And somehow the little boy wasn't injured, even though he was weak and cried.
The captain's wife took the wee fellow away, bathed him and tucked him up into a bed.
And then we got a retained placenta.
Everything went wrong that night. There we were, working with just the light from one lightbulb, and the placenta wouldn't come out.
It was obvious the mother was starting to bleed and it was obvious the placenta hadn't separated from the womb as it should have.
Once the placenta was out I knew I could give her an injection to make her womb contract, which would help stop the bleeding, but I had to get the placenta out first.
So I had to go in with my hand and peel it off the walls of the womb.
I was terrified, because it is so easy to tear the wall of the womb and cause even more problems, but it was the only way to save the woman's life.
I didn't say anything. I just quietly got on with it, because I didn't want people to panic.
I was still under the guidance of God and he gave me strength, for by some miracle, I was able to ascertain that I hadn't torn the womb.
As soon as the placenta was delivered, we gave the mother the injection to control her bleeding.
The Home League women came in and brought her refreshments and I left her in the delivery room for two hours before moving her over to the ward.
It was the middle of the night by this time and I thought it was safe to go and have a bit of a rest, because I would have to be up and on duty again when clinic opened at 8am.
I asked one of the nurses to stay with the mother and check on her every hour.
Some time later she came rushing downstairs and said, "She's bleeding." We had a haemorrhage on our hands as well.
We tried to put a sandbag on the top of the mother's stomach to keep her womb from filling up with blood, but she refused to have it and threw it off.
We gave her another injection.
We worked till daybreak and we saved her life again - under direction from the little voice that seemed to talk in my ear an awful lot.
It was one of those times when I didn't know what to do in my own strength, but because God took me to Indonesia, He gave me the power to do what I needed to do.
The book is for sale at the Mosgiel Christian Bookshop.
