RPCV Doctor Ellen Einterz is at her mission hospital in the bush village of Kolofata in Cameroon
Dan Carpenter
Strong heart medicine
December 21, 2003
In a season of peace with no peace in sight, darkened by the polarization of my country and the exclusionary hardening of my church, I cast about for healing and find a couple of doctors.
Americans. Catholics. Enemies of no one. Too busy prolonging people's stay on earth to judge who deserves heaven.
Paul Farmer and Ellen Einterz are brilliant physicians who could be earning bigger bucks than the guys who advertise tummy tucks and laser lifts in the Yellow Pages.
Instead, they live and work in countries where the average annual income wouldn't pay for a good day's excursion in Circle Centre, where obesity as a health problem is no match for cholera or malaria or AIDS, where children die for lack of drugs that are plentiful back here.
What's most remarkable about these two is not that they soldier on in the face of despair and injustice and impossibility, but that they are, by all evidence, successful and happy.
Farmer's accomplishments are the more obvious. Subject of a biography published this year by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Kidder, he is a faculty member of Harvard Medical School, recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant and procurer of the largest private donation ever to fight tuberculosis, a $44.7 million gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He won't stop hopping planes to destitute countries long enough to rest on any of those laurels, but surely none of them gives him more pride than Zanmi Lasante clinic, which he founded in Haiti.
Einterz is a North Central High School graduate whose newsletters from her mission hospital in Cameroon I have shamelessly appropriated over the years because she not only does more good than I, she writes better.
It's now 20 years since she went to Africa with her medical degree, a degree this gifted scholar and musician sought after she taught in the Peace Corps and observed that Third World people needed doctors more than teachers.
This past year, she reports, her hospital in the bush village of Kolofata has added a children's ward. Two years ago, it built a women's center in this patriarchal Muslim community, where a Catholic lady doctor blends and does not proselytize. A sports-health camp for girls started last summer. Two health centers are going up in neighboring towns.
Donors back home are coming through, in other words. Their missionary, writing home with poetic precision after 16-hour days of ceaseless emergency, thanks them as much for her own opportunity as for her patients' lives.
Farmer, likewise, is a transmitter rather than a receiver of gratitude. When he visited here last spring on behalf of the service and advocacy organization called Partners in Health, he was asked about the relentless schedule that denies him most of the perks of a Harvard doctor.
"I get enough of these breaks," he said with characteristic impatience. "I worry about the people who come to our clinics, who struggle every day to get water and firewood."
An answer to that same question shines through Einterz's latest Christmas newsletter.
"Oumar would be going back home, and so would Fatima and most of the other children now slumbering in our beds. Others would come to take their place, and then others to take theirs, and each child who came would have a sadness and a hope all her own. To share that with them is our greatest privilege and recurring joy."
Gratefully, I shall take that into this Advent darkness.
Carpenter is a Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at 1-317-444-6172 or at dan.carpenter@indystar.com .
