Zella Holbert Award

Dr. Houmann is a Takoma Park native, born at the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital. He grew up as a missionary kid in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, where his father, Carl Houmann, was a missionary physician. Per went to Sligo School and Takoma Academy. He graduated from CUC with as a biology major in 1978. In 1983 he entered Loma Linda University School of Dentistry; during his Senior year of dental school he worked with the Navajos at Monument Valley, Utah. He planned on going to Nairobi a year after dental school, but the Lord had other plans. As he tells it, “Northern New England became our mission field.” Houmann began his dental practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In 1993, Houmann accepted a call to be the director of the Clinique Dentaire Adventist in Kigali, Rwanda. He was the only full service dentist for the entire country of 11 million people, and, not surprisingly, he was overwhelmingly busy. Just eight months after arriving in Rwanda, civil war broke out, and Dr. Houmann, his family, and other workers at the Adventist compound took refuge in the basement of his house-the only one on the compound which had a basement. The United Nations was able to arrange a cease-fire and the Houmanns were evacuated to Burundi, then Nairobi, Kenya. 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda between April and July that year.

The Houmanns finally returned to Takoma Park, and Per spent 6 months speaking to various organizations and gathering supplies and equipment to go back to Africa. In 1994he accepted a call to be director of Adventist Health Center Lilongwe in Malawi, and he worked there until 1999.
He has returned to Maryland and has been practicing dentistry in Frederick and Hagerstown until the present. Dr. Houmann has made dental related mission trips to Zambia in 2001 and Argentina in 2006. He is currently an active member and past president (2005) of the National Association of Seventh-day Adventist Dentist, which has primarily focus on missions. He is currently involved in prison ministries.

Dr. Houmann’s entire family has been shaped by mission. His dear wife, Ali, was a CUC student missionary to England in 1976, and their daughter Petra is currently a CUC student missionary in Denmark. Their second daughter, Martina, is currently a pre-college student missionary in Norway.