When Bull Elephants Fight:
An American Surgeon's Chronicle of Congo
Roger L. Youmans
Prologue
My wife handed me the plain, cream-colored postcard that evening in early December 1960. It was from the Christian Medical Society. The card said there was an urgent need for American doctors to staff the abandoned hospitals in Congo. The recent riots in Congo, the disappearance of Prime Minister Lumumba, and the collapse of the medical care system, had been the cause of the crisis. The card asked me to write to them if I could go and help, even for as little as six months. My wife, Winkie, had been watching me as I read, and when I looked up she asked, "Why would any American doctor want to go to Congo and get into the middle of that mess?"
"I don't know," I said and tossed the postcard onto the table. I knew Congo was in desperate need of doctors and medical help, but I also knew they needed a stable government. I wandered into the kitchen and ate leftovers from supper. I was tired and wanted to go to bed. I had to be back at the hospital by 6:30 the next morning.
I had a lot of other things on my mind, and I was tired all the time. A surgical resident in a university medical center works long hours with the constant pressure of new patients, surgical operations, conferences, and never ending stacks of charts with discharge summaries to be dictated. I was a second year resident in surgery and hoped to work overseas someday, maybe as a missionary doctor, but had never actually been out of the United States. I had known a girl from India and had thought in terms of going there. I had known a lot of Blacks, and I had considered going to Africa someday, maybe to Congo in a few years when my specialty training was finished - if the Congo had settled down by that time.
Things in Congo did not settle down. The newspapers, television, and radio continued to tell of the chaos and conflict there. They reported that since Lumumba had been murdered, several large tribes that had supported him were now in rebellion against their own government. Tshombe, the governor of one of the provinces that was rich in copper and diamonds, the source of most of the foreign exchange for Congo, had also rebelled against the Kinshasa government. The United Nations sent "peace keepers" to stop the foreign mercenary soldiers from supporting Tshombe, and to try to hold Congo together as a nation. The newspapers and magazines showed pictures of refugees, mostly skinny women with malnourished babies on their backs and frightened children clinging to their skirts as they fled their destroyed villages. Stories were printed of marauding soldiers killing people and plundering villages in the interior, and of primitive tribesmen armed with spears and magic potions to protect them from bullets. They used horrible ritual killings to terrify their enemies. There was a vivid story of an American woman, a doctor, who was gang-raped at her hospital mission station by a bunch of marauding men. No Congolese physicians had ever been trained in Congo, and most of the foreign doctors had already fled the country. Malaria, smallpox and starvation were the scourges of the villagers. The Congolese people were both helpless and pathetic. I turned away in anguish and tried to push those images out of my mind, but I couldn't.
I sometimes dreamed about the epidemics of exotic diseases that could have been cured with modern medicines if they had been available, and of sick mothers with scrawny babies too weak to brush the flies out of their eyes. The reports and images haunted me and I kept thinking about what I could do in one of those abandoned hospitals. I knew I could help, but I was afraid.
One evening a few weeks after Christmas I opened a surgery text to prepare for the next day’s operations, and stuck in the pages was that postcard asking for doctors to come to Congo and help. It now seemed like an urgent call for me. When I told Winkie, she sat silently a moment before replying, "At least your children would have a chance to get acquainted with you if we went to Congo."
I hadn’t really thought about my family going with me to Congo. How could I possibly take them into such danger, even if I had the money, and of course I didn't. The postcard hadn’t mentioned families. If I were to go to Congo I would have to give notice to the hospital and the chairman of the department of surgery. If my family went with me we would have to pack up everything we owned and sell or rent our house. There would be immunizations, even for our two little girls. And there would be new languages to learn. How could we do all of this while I continued to work 80 hours a week at the hospital?
Even as these thoughts crossed my mind, I realized the question had subtly changed from "Why would any American doctor want go to Congo and get into that mess?" to "How could we go?" It was a very significant change.
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