Before I retired from full-time employment, I regularly travelled outside Bahrain in order to visit the company operations established across sub-Saharan Africa. One of the countries I visited was Gabon on the west coast of the continent.
Our business in the country was at Port Gentil where the oil industry in the country was centred. Port Gentil was at the mouth of the Ogooué River and it was around 200 miles up the river in 1913 that Dr Albert Schweitzer established a small hospital having studied tropical medicine and surgery.
His wife Helene accompanied him and as a qualified nurse she helped her husband in his pursuits; later, she became skilled at delivering anaesthesia to the patients on whom Albert would operate.
The maladies the Schweitzers treated were both horrific and deadly. They ranged from leprosy, dysentery, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness, malaria, yellow fever, to wounds incurred by encounters with wild animals. The living conditions were the most basic with makeshift huts for shelter and medical care in an environment of hot, steamy tropical days, cold nights, and huge gusts of wind and rainfall.
Schweitzer and his wife did their best and in the first nine months, they treated more than 2,000 patients. In the years that followed, the hospital grew by leaps and bounds, not only in terms of bricks and mortar but also in its delivery of comprehensive and modern healthcare. By the 1950s, three unpaid physicians, seven nurses and 13 volunteer aides staffed the Schweitzer Hospital. At the time of Dr Schweitzer’s death, at age 90 in 1965, the compound comprised 70 buildings, 350 beds and a leper colony for 200.
I am reminded of the Schweitzers after reading about another medical doctor who is today doing wonderful work in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is Dr Denis Mukwege and has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work involved in treating women who have experienced sexual violence as a weapon of war.
In his acceptance speech in Oslo in December last year, he said: “My name is Dr Mukwege. I come from one of the richest countries on the planet. Yet the people of my country are the poorest of the world. My country is being systematically looted with the complicity of the people claiming to be our leaders. The Congolese people have been humiliated, abused and massacred for more than two decades in plain sight of the international community.”
The DRC has been plundered for years for the valuable resources such as gold, copper, tin and diamonds. More recently other minerals have become so important such as tantalum used to manufacture capacitors and cobalt needed for the laptops, mobile phones and importantly car batteries for the growing number of electric vehicles.
The militias who control lawless parts of the country use rape as part of their atrocious violence. Over two decades Dr Mukwege has treated more than 54,000 rape victims and the most horrific incident he had to deal with was in 2014. Having thought he had seen the worst of the worst he treated a baby of 18 months who had been raped.
Despite the horrors, Dr Mukwege, at great personal risks to him and his family, keeps on working to help thousands of women and children.
Humbling, is it not?
Gordon is the former president and chief executive of BMMI. He can be reached at gordonboyle@hotmail.com