The first time Dr. Dick Stoughton, his wife Loretta and their seven children left the south African nation then known as Rhodesia was in 1975.
The Ian Smith minority white-ruled government, which was waging a bloody civil war with freedom-fighting rebels, wanted him to serve in the Rhodesian Army. When the young Catholic physician from Wisconsin - who had been volunteering as a Mission Doctor at St. Theresa's Hospital for nearly five years - refused, he was flatly told, "Then we will put you in jail."
So the Stoughtons packed up and headed back home to the Midwest.
Thirty-three years later the retired family practice doctor and his wife left now-Zimbabwe again, after serving at the same bush hospital in the Chirumazu district of Midlands province since 2001. With escalating violence between followers of longtime ruler President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai spreading throughout the country, the Stoughtons decided to leave early for their annual trip visiting their growing family stateside.
Watching the nightly news about Zimbabwe's downfall with the world's highest inflation, 90 percent unemployment, shortages of basic goods, a failed election - along with a cholera epidemic infecting tens of thousands of people - was painful and depressing for Dick and Loretta. So the couple decided to return to their mission outpost.
"We had a commitment here, projects to finish and we were pretty sure we were coming back; we just didn't know for sure when," Dr. Stoughton explained during a recent phone interview from Africa. "And we don't have a home in the states. We've been here for 7 1/2 years. We were back there for four months, and we knew at that point it was time to come back and continue our work. And we really had a tremendous welcome."
'Horrendous' economy
It's only been weeks since Mugabe and Tsvangirai formed a so-called "Unity" government under pressure from South Africa President Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders. But to date most on-the-scene news organizations have reported that the political experiment is a disaster.
A March headline from chicagotribune.com declared: "Zimbabwe: 'Unity' government in name only." An ABC foreign correspondent who snuck into the beleaguered country last month went even further. "It is how I image a post-apocalyptic world would be: a world undone by neglect and madness," he observed.
Dr. Stoughton agreed that the economy is "absolutely horrendous." But he added that health workers and teachers are now getting at least some pay in U.S. dollars, and that the new finance minister wants to bring the country back into some degree of "financial sense," living within the means of collected taxes.
He also said food supplies are more available, although goods are still expensive because everything has to be imported from South Africa. He acknowledged being concerned about violence last year, but, thankfully, there was very little in the hospital's Midlands province.
Again, the local area has been fortunate about the country's cholera epidemic, the physician pointed out. In the past, the hospital has treated cholera patients, but not a single case for about a month. Yet he reported that cholera is still occurring in other parts of the country, with more than 90,000 cases and 4,000 deaths so far.
What Zimbabwe needs at the moment, he said, is a lot of international aid, which most industrial countries, including the United States, have refused to provide as long as 85-year-old President Mugabe remains in power.
AIDS stigma gone
"We're here as guests of the country, and we're not here for political reasons," Dr. Stoughton stressed. "Our main work is dealing with sick people and trying to get people who have AIDS on proper medication. When we came back in 2001, 80 percent of the sick people in the hospital were HIV positive and we weren't able to treat them at that time.
"But now we've been treating people nearly 4 1/2 years," he said. "Right now we have more than 300 people who we've treated for more than 2 1/2 years and more than 1,000 who are coming back on a regular basis for their anti-retroviral drugs. They're doing exceptionally well.
"And the stigma against testing for HIV and AIDS has essentially gone away in our area. We had a meeting yesterday here with people living with AIDS. There were 250 standing up and talking about their disease in public in front of their families."
This July the Stoughtons are coming home to "really retire" in Florida near some of their children and their families. Loretta will give up her prayer group meetings, which have spread to some 2,000 women, and Dick will leave his two African physician colleagues. But he'll continue to visit St. Theresa's once a year, spending a month at the bush hospital. He will also keep on raising money for the Mission Doctors Association.
"It's difficult these days for young doctors to do it because they come out of school with such high debt," he noted. "But we have more and more doctors who are retiring and still have many, many good useful years of work left in them. And I think it's a tremendously rewarding work to do when somebody gets towards retirement age. They can spend two years or three years or five years - or even one or two months in the short-term Mission Doctors Association program - in giving something back for all that God has given to us."
The veteran family practitioner said the work was extremely rewarding, stretching his knowledge and skills as a physician, while constantly reminding him of why he became a doctor in the first place.
This morning, for example, he made rounds in the women's ward, where there were 30 patients. Five were severely ill with tuberculosis; three had AIDS with cryptococcal meningitis, which is practically unheard of in the United States; a couple were recovering from strokes; and an elderly woman had a broken wrist, a younger one a femur fracture.
Tomorrow there would be more patients at the 180-bed hospital with diarrheal diseases, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses, tropical infections, cuts and burns and, of course, HIV/AIDS, plus plenty of babies to be born.
"There's such a wide range of things to do because there's essentially no referral place, except for surgical cases, to send them," Dr. Stoughton said. "It's a full course of just anything and everything. So you take care of it as well as you can. And that can be frustrating at times, but it also is very satisfying." For more information about the Mission Doctors Association or to make a donation to the work of Dr. Dick Stoughton at St. Theresa's Hospital in Zimbabwe, go to http://www.MissionDoctors.org or contact Elise Frederick, executive director, at missiondrs@earthlink.net or (213) 368-1875.
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