ST. JOHNS, NFLD – When Dr. Dawn Howse was offered a chance towork as a physician in an acute-care hospital run bythe Salvation Army in Zimbabwe, it was a dreamcome true.
“It was a way of answering two callings at once,”said the Salvation Army officer, who had long been interested in going to Africa.
Howse completed a degree in medicine at Memorial University before spending five years as a physician in Woody Point, on the west coast of the island, then another five years in private practice in Corner Brook.
She returned to St. John’s in 1986, where she began a two-year program of study for officership in The Salvation Army. At the same time, she travelled to Liverpool, England, where she received a diploma intropical medicine, having completed courses inpublic health, entomology and epidemiology.
Soon after that, her church offered her a placement atthe 100-bed Tshelanyemba Hospital in Zimbabwe. The Salvation Army runs a number of acute-care hospitals worldwide.
At Tshelanyemba, Howse said, she specializes mainly in acute care, but about 50 per cent of her patients are HIV positive, and the majority of those patients are young people.
“The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is about 40 years,” Howse explained, adding she often finds it challenging to work in an environment where so many young patients are dying.
The prevalence of HIV and AIDS among adults in Zimbabwe is 24.6 per cent, according to the CIA World Fact Book. In 2003, 170,000 people in the country died of the disease.
A country with a population of just over 12 millionpeople, 1.8 million Zimbabwe residents are infected with HIV and/or AIDS.
It’s not that people are unaware of the dangers of HIV and the ways of contracting the disease – it’s that many young people in Zimbabwe, like young people in North America, often have the wrong attitudes when it comes to safe sex.
“They are not aware of their own mortality, and they think, ‘It can’t happen to me,’ or they think, ‘I’m going to get it some time anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself,’ ” Howse explained.
The hospital has a team of more than 300 volunteers, most of them women, who work as an AIDS team, travelling to the homes of the bedridden, counsellingfamilies and overseeing the care of orphans. It iscommon to see children as young as 15 as heads ofhouseholds, Howse said.
Howse returns to St. John’s once a year, and says insome ways it’s harder to live here than in Africa. “One of the hardest things to see is the trend for obesity here,” she said. “Very few people in Zimbabwe are overweight, or even normal weight. It’s very hard to see this trend here for self-destructive behaviour.
“Progress is being made in Zimbabwe in terms of treatment of HIV, Howse said. Antiretroviral drugs -which slow down the replication of HIV in the body, and which have been available in North America forat least 15 years – have started to become available in Africa, allowing infected patients to live longer.
“That’s the best part of my job – being able to see people get better,” Howse said.
What is your full name?
Glennis Dawn Howse.
Where and when were you born?
The Salvation Army Grace General Hospital, St.John’s, in June 1956.
Where is home today?
Tshelanyemba Hospital, Zimbabwe. For those with Google Earth, the co-ordinates are 21 20’53 90′S and 28 29’17.18′E, elevation 867m.
What are you reading at the moment?
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. For escapism, I got to my favourite authors- Agatha Christie, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, Dick Francis, Stephen Donaldson, Terry Pratchettand Ellis Peters. To challenge my thinking, C.S.Lewis and John Stott.
Article by Tara Bradbury Mullownet
Source: The Telegram