Immanuel Benjamin, MD was born in British India in the third generation of a Christian family in a predominantly Muslim region. He is a graduate of Forman Christian College in Lahore, and took his medical training at the Ishtar Medical School in Multan, Pakistan. His medical internship and residency were completed at United Christian Hospital in Lahore. The hospital needed more surgeons, so Dr. Benjamin took a fellowship at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, completing his residency at the famed Mayo Clinic. When he returned to UCH in Lahore, he quickly became the head of surgery and then medical director of the hospital itself. In 1977, with the political changes in Pakistan, Dr. Benjamin decided to take his family to America. He settled in Ontario, Oregon, and served hospitals in Nyssa and Ontario in Oregon and Weiser and Payette, Idaho. He met his second wife, Jacquelyn Horton Gregory, at a reunion gathering of medical people from Pakistan. They were married and moved to Emmett, Idaho, where Dr. Benjamin opened his surgical practice and was a surgeon at Walter Knox Memorial Hospital, while also practicing in Ontario and Payette. In 2000, Dr. Benjamin and his new wife Jackie joined the First Presbyterian Church, where they have been actively involved.

In early 2005, at the age of 72, Dr. Benjamin began to make plans to retire from his surgical practice. But he had a dream of returning to Pakistan to help restore United Christian hospital in Lahore, which had given him so much of his training as a young man. So he and Jackie took the month of March to visit Pakistan and friends, relatives, church contacts and medical colleagues there to see if they might welcome such a return. Over the last twenty years, UCH had declined due to lack of maintenance, and various departments had been closed. The Nursing School stopped admitting new students in 2004, because patient census had fallen so low. After assessing the situation, and after considerable prayer and reflection with his wife, they returned to Emmett, and shared with their pastor a sencse of call to do mission work at UCH.

Delighted at the thought that God was calling Dr. Immanuel Benjamin to mission work in his homeland, Pastor Betty Beck met with the Session of First Presbyterian Church in Emmett, a congregation of about 75 members, and they petitioned Boise Presbytery to come to Emmett and commission Dr. Benjamin to lay mission work at UCH. On May 15, 2005, Dr. Benjamin was commissioned at a special service witnessed by about 150 members and friends at First Presbyterian Church in Emmett. Two weeks later, Immanuel and Jackie Benjamin left on a six-week cross-country fund raising trip, two weeks of which were spent meeting with supporters in England. In the Philadelphia area, five churches heard of Dr. Benjamin's mission project and several took special offerings to support it. Pakistani American doctors and nurses have also generously supported the project. Immmanuel and Jackie have met with Presbyterian Church (USA) and United Methodist mission officials, who have helped with indentifying funding sources. Former mission doctors and colleagues at UCH have given generously to the project. By the end of June 2005, the Benjamin - UCH Fund had received over $18,000 in donations, with more coming in from other churches and supporters. Because of his reputation for service and integrity in the medical and the religious community, Dr. Benjamin has generated a solid foundation for the work he has envisioned at UCH and the Nursing School.

On October 4th, 2005, Dr. Benjamin returned to Lahore to begin his work, while his wife Jackie stayed in Idaho to continue the fund raising work.