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STOUGHTON Aug-19-2008 (1,060 words) With photo. xxxn
Mission doctor eager to return to Zimbabwe
By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Dr. Richard Stoughton, a U.S. physician, and his wife, Loretta, have been based in Zimbabwe for the past six years, but for much of the spring and summer this year they have lived an itinerant lifestyle in the States, because of political instability and violence that surrounded the elections in the southern African nation.
But with hopes for a negotiated power-sharing agreement between President Robert Mugabe, in power for 28 years, and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Stoughton was eager to get back and practice medicine. The couple planned to head back to Zimbabwe Aug. 21.
Now 71, Stoughton said he's making his commitment to stay in Zimbabwe one year at a time. But he had grown a bit weary crisscrossing the U.S. and staying at the homes of the couple's children and friends.
"It's our home," he said of Zimbabwe, where he serves at St. Theresa Hospital in Charandura. "We miss being in our home, doing our stuff. We don't have a home here. We're living with people. We're living with our kids here and there. There's a lot of traveling involved. I miss the people. I miss the work. I miss being with the people."
The Stoughtons' first mission work was for five and a half years, in 1970-75, when Zimbabwe was still known as Rhodesia.
After graduating from Creighton University's medical school in Omaha, Neb., in 1962, Stoughton served five years in the Navy.
"After my residency we had moved to a small town in Colorado, thinking that's where we wanted to practice, and it didn't work out," he said in an Aug. 11 telephone interview with Catholic News Service from Lake Mary, Fla., where one of his children lives.
With his wife urging him to "make a move," he said he told her: "If you're going to make a move, what do you think of doing some medical missionary work?"
"She said, 'You know, I've always thought about doing something like that, but I thought you were too practical,'" Stoughton said with a chuckle.
That trip was sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Mission Doctors Association. The Stoughtons brought their five children with them, and two more children were born while they were in Rhodesia.
The association, founded in 1959 to help Catholic doctors and their families pursue service in mission hospitals and clinics, also sponsored the couple's more recent foray to Zimbabwe in 2000.
Once he retired from private practice, "we both knew that I couldn't just sit around and do nothing," Stoughton said. "We talked about many different options, mostly short-term." Then they went on a retreat led by Auxiliary Bishop Robert F. Morneau of Green Bay, Wis., their home state: The retreat topic was service.
As Stoughton recalled, "My wife came to me and said, 'Maybe we've been selfish in thinking in terms of short-term work. Maybe we're healthy enough and able enough to do some long-term service.'"
Stoughton has seen big changes in the health of Zimbabweans between the 1970s and the 2000s.
"One change is that some of the work that we had been very involved in in preventive medicine has shown fruition so that there was no measles, no whooping cough, no polio, none of the preventable infectious diseases," he told CNS.
"But the biggest change was the AIDS pandemic," Stoughton added. "Seventy-five percent of the people in the hospital are sick with AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses."
St. Theresa Hospital has 160 beds, with about half of them filled on any given day.
"That's the big focus of what we're doing now: treating people, talking about prevention," he said.
Even there, significant improvement has been made. "Now we have about 1,100 people who have started on antiretroviral drug treatment with 75 percent of them" doing well with "essentially normal health," he said. "That's a huge, huge, huge difference."
Stoughton said, "I've had women come in that weighed 60 pounds when we started them on treatment, and six months later they weighed 120 pounds. It might be the only time you know anybody who gained 60 pounds and is happy about it."
The Dominican sisters who operate the hospital -- Stoughton is just one of three physicians there and the only non-Zimbabwean -- have contacts with a German nonprofit agency that provides generic antiretroviral drugs at cost to mission hospitals like St. Theresa. "That's been extremely helpful," he noted.
Were it not for the drugs, according to Stoughton, those empty hospital beds would be filled with dying AIDS patients.
"Life expectancy (in Zimbabwe) is 35 now because of HIV. It's the lowest in the world," Stoughton said. With the drugs, he added, life spans can be lengthened "not only five years but maybe 25 years or maybe 45 years. Nobody knows how long people can live if they take their HIV drugs correctly."
Life for a mission physician has its difficulties. "For quite a time there's hardly any mainline electricity so we have to run a generator, and we can't afford to run the generator more than four hours a day," Stoughton said. "So we have to do laundry and do surgery and sterilize the equipment all in the same four hours."
During heavy rains, the path to the main road, 20 miles away, becomes impassable. Still, contact with the rest of the world is possible.
"It's not real easy, but I get e-mails almost daily," Stoughton said. "I have to take my computer to the hospital and plug into the landline. For a cell phone connection, I have to have an antenna at my house and have a cell phone connected to my computer. We try to call somebody in our family every one to two weeks so they can call around and let them know we're dong all right."
The Stoughtons headed back to the States at the end of April not because of any direct threats, but because of the threat of threats during the pre-election violence.
"We had a visitor from Wisconsin who was with us and I was very concerned with having someone with us. We had some local threats," and doctors at other mission hospitals in the region had reported threats, Stoughton said. "We were planning to come back anyway in July for a family vacation. We just moved that date up to the end of April."
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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