Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
October 9, 2002
African doctor can't cure, but heals HIV/AIDS victims in Ghana
Shekhinah clinics enable people to die with dignity from pandemic claiming 550 a day in Africa
By Jack Bacon
Dr. David Abdulai, 51, physician, husband and father of three young daughters, operates a pair of clinics in his home town in northern Ghana to serve the sick who can't get treated anywhere else.
Many are HIV/AIDS victims for whom the clinics can do little to treat, but a great deal to heal.
"They're the most unwanted and most ostracized in our society," Abdulai said. There are 28.1 million of them in Africa, dying at the rate of 550 a day.
What can his under-equipped and under-supplied clinics do for victims without hope of physical recovery? Help them die in peace and dignity by convincing them they are not alone, "that God still loves them completely and unconditionally," he said.
He dismisses, with a chuckle, a printed reference to him as "the Mother Teresa of Africa."
"I'm also the 'Mad Doctor of Ghana,'" he said, because of his decision to walk away from a stable position as a government surgeon to conduct his "experiment in faith."
"I could have made a lot of money," he said, but "there was something in me that was unfulfilled. I wanted happiness and I believed God would give me this happiness."
Abdulai said the story of his Shekhinah Clinic in Tamale, Ghana, isn't really his, making the point with an account of being interviewed by a reporter.
"While we sat there talking, I kept mentioning God and what God was doing for us. ... At the end of my talking, he said, 'I came to write a story about you, not about God. Tell me about yourself.'
"I told him, 'I'm sorry, there's nothing about me to write about. Forget about it.'"
"I see everything in light of my relationship with God," Abdulai told an audience at Regis University Sept. 30. "Without God's help there is nothing to talk about in my life."
Abdulai was in Denver last week to tell the story, first to the congregation of St. Ignatius of Loyola Parish Sept. 29, then to classes and in a public address at Regis Sept. 30. The appearances here were among stops in 40 U.S. dioceses, sponsored by Catholic Relief Services to publicize and solicit support for its Africa Rising program, which focuses heavily on HIV/AIDS in its programs for both short-term relief and lasting improvement in the lives of the continent's people.
Abdulai said for him the important message is letting non-Africans know that African countries are expanding their efforts to deal with HIV/AIDS.
"We're not just sitting back and doing nothing," he said. "I'm here as a sign of hope for the African people ... to tell (American) people Africans are doing something for themselves."
Abdulai said Shekhinah begin in 1989, when he performed the clinic's first surgery — outdoors under a mango tree in Tamale where the clinic now stands. Two years later he left the government to devote full time to the work.
"I felt God was calling me to trust him absolutely," he said.
The second clinic station opened about 15 kilometers from the first three years ago, to limit the number of people treated in the same place.
"Small is beautiful," Abdulai said, adding that in too many large medical facilities people somehow are treated as though "they're no longer human beings."
The name Shekhinah was suggested by a Catholic priest who told him it means "Glory of God" and is a Hebrew word taken from the Book of Exodus.
Abdulai said its patients "have nowhere else to go," and that the number of people who need care and treatment far exceeds Shekhinah's capacity. Each clinic is treating about 45 patients at a time, for every type of illness and injury. If the clinic can't handle a specific ailment, an attempt is made to get them admitted elsewhere, but that's virtually impossible because his patients have no money.
Physical treatment of HIV/AIDS patients at Shekhinah consists to a large degree of dealing with other ailments that stem from the breakdown of the immune system. AIDS medication isn't available.
"We do not have drugs for HIV/AIDS at all," Abdulai said, and only recently has Shekhinah had the capacity to test for the virus. It's difficult to persuade many to submit to testing, because of fear both of the disease and the social stigma still strong in much of Africa, although that phenomenon has declined substantially in Europe and America.
Northern Ghana's population is largely Muslim, with beliefs that HIV/AIDS is sinful, for men and women. Fear of infection contributes to social ostracism of victims. The combination breeds despair.
"They feel, 'I am a sinner, therefore that's why God doesn't want me,'" Abdulai said.
"The worst disease in the world is not cancer, it's not leprosy, but it's the feeling that nobody wants me. (AIDS victims) are made to feel that even God doesn't want them."
Just restoring the feeling of worth, that they're loved, "makes dying easier," he said.
Abdulai sprinkles anecdotes from his experience liberally through his presentation: the story of a blind woman whose fear for her children after she died was allayed by assurance they would be cared for by Shekhinah staff, the despair of a former prostitute too old and sick to work and alienated from her family. Abdulai had treated the older woman at Shekhinah and sent her home to Lagos, Nigeria.
"I had a feeling one day about her," he said. He borrowed a car from a priest, drove to Lagos and found the woman living in filth with no food and being attended by no one. He drove her back to Tamale and Shekhinah. Part of her recovery of spirit, Abdulai said, was achieved by acceding to her increasing demands for minor favors, including treats of food.
He said he was asked, "Why do you give it to her? It's a waste." The woman was experiencing love, he said — "For six weeks we tried to supply all that she wanted." She was testing: "Now I want it, I can get it. I'm therefore loved."
"She was the first person to die at the clinic," Abdulai said. "We've had many people like that."
Shekhinah's experience of the past 11 years has involved services beyond simple medical treatment: Abdulai's wife, Doris, cooks in their home simple meals distributed daily to clinic staffers, patients and the destitute on the streets of Tamale. Special services are dispensed to the mentally ill. An orphanage is maintained for children whose parents have died, usually of AIDS.
Karen Smith of Baltimore, a staff member of Catholic Relief Services, the international aid agency of U.S. Catholics, accompanied Abdulai on part of his U.S. tour. She said the devastating impact of AIDS on Africa is graphically demonstrated by the virtual loss of a generation in village after village, country after country, resulting in an orphan population of 11 million. A few of Shekhinah's patients come from neighboring Burkina Faso and Togo and nearby Benin and Nigeria.
Abdulai also was an orphan. His mother, who carried water to earn a meager existence, and 11 siblings died of malnutrition, his father of leprosy. As a small child and the lone survivor of the Muslim family, he was rescued from the street by a Catholic priest who enrolled him in school. He subsequently became a Catholic.
He became a physician in 1979 after studying tropical medicine in Ireland and surgery in Zambia. He was stationed in the Volta region when he and Doris married.
The town of Tamale was "adopted" two decades ago by a Catholic parish in England, Our Lady of the Forest in Forest Row, Sussex, that increased its assistance to the town by sending medical materials to Shekhinah after the clinic opened. One gift — two oxygen concentrators — caused Abdulai a problem with the district government. A dispute over whether the clinic should pay taxes on the gift forced the clinic to close for a week in May 2000, but it was resolved when officials acknowledged a free medical institution with no income couldn't pay taxes.
Abdulai said the clinic has always relied "totally on divine providence," which apparently also includes tax exemptions.
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