Mending Africa’s maladies

Sarika Sharma

She was a young girl, all of nine years, and a heart patient. As she left for surgery to Chandigarh, her father kissed her goodbye at Rawanda airport. For him, it was seemingly a final goodbye; he didn’t hope she would return alive. But she did and ran into his arms at that very airport where he had bid her adieu a month ago. Past Rotary International president R K Saboo narrates their story as told by the girl’s father to an audience in Rawanda, which had been worst hit by genocide in 1994. Smilingly, he recalls how the father had fought back his tears as he shared the story and how that young girl, also in the audience, had giggled through it. This is one of the many tales that emerged out of Rotary’s Reach-Out to Africa (ROTA) initiative.

Saboo’s tenure as Rotary International president (1991-92) was long over, but the theme from that year — Look Beyond Yourself — has since stayed with him and his wife, Usha. One day, she reminded him about it again. “Shouldn’t we involve ourselves in doing what we have been telling others to do?” she had asked. “That, in a way, made us think about making concrete efforts,” he says as he shares the beginning of sending health missions to Africa. In the past 18 years, several teams of doctors and volunteers have embarked on ROTA and brought relief to thousands in some of the world’s poorest countries.

Why Africa? We ask. Torn by civil wars and crushed under poverty, Africa seemed ideal, he says. Add to it the governments that didn’t have much in their hands.

Their first mission was to Uganda in August 1998 where they were to carry out polio corrective and eye surgeries. Saboo still remembers their first destination, Masaka. A bus with wooden benches took them to the place. “There was no infrastructure. The level of healthcare in this big Ugandan town was even below that of our health centres at, say, the tehsil level. At the camp, children had been screened for polio corrective surgeries. They came in crawling, their limbs covered in dust. The hospital didn’t have paramedical staff, and Usha and I volunteered to clean their limbs. As we prepared them for surgery, she asked me if I remembered what day it was. I said I didn’t. She said it was my birthday. I told her it couldn’t have been spent better,” he recalls.

There is another incident from Uganda that has stayed with Saboo. He was ferrying kids to the operation table and there was this seven or eight-year-old girl who had been given anaesthesia and was panicking under its influence. “Suddenly, her eyes stopped at me and she raised a finger. I went to her and held it and she went to sleep. There is nothing more satisfying than the empathy you feel for a fellow human,” he says. That mission to Uganda was the beginning of a long journey and slowly ROTA became a beacon of hope for people there — people, who thought they were destined to live and die with abnormalities, their limbs mutilated in war, minds and hearts hurt deep inside, says Saboo. Rotary medical teams have tried to give services in diverse fields — dental, ENT, urology, pathology, etc. among others — and in countries spread far and wide, including Ethiopia, Nigeria, Malawi, Swaziland, Cambodia, Madagascar and Lesotho.

Most locals come to these camps with the hope of some miracle. Only the rest of the world calls this miracle as medical science, non-existent in most areas where Rotary medical teams went to due to lack of education. In such a scenario, not even funds pouring in from the developed world were of any help, says Saboo. The costliest of machinery lay unused, while lives were wasted.

Across the years, close to 40,000 surgeries and procedures have been conducted and more than 1,5 lakh lives have benefited. Many prominent doctors from this region such as renowned plastic surgeon Dr PS Chari, have offered their services for this kind act towards humanity. However, as these medicare missions gave the gift of normal life to these most deprived of people, there was a demand for such missions in India too. A beginning was made in 2005-2006 in Orissa’s Kalahandi, the most backward of tribal areas in the country. The Rotary teams went to the remotest of areas, some of these under Naxal control. These placed had hospitals but minus doctors, paramedics and infrastructure. Teams of 20-25 doctors and volunteers have since rendered their services in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland and Jammu & Kashmir.

Saboo says they don’t take up surgeries involving heart diseases and cancer as many of these remote places do not have the requisite backup for such major interventions. However, such patients are being brought to Chandigarh by the local Rotary Club to be treated by the best of doctors amid best of facilities here. Efforts are also being made to train local African doctors and some change is vivible. Saboo says their doctors have made the mission a worthwhile effort. He is looking forward to embarking upon many more such journeys and weaving many such tales.