Physician urges donations, service to help small African facility
When the Rev. Scott Henning first met Joel Carpenter, Henning was in Chicago and Carpenter was in middle school. Over the next 40 years, the two remained in touch.Henning is a pastor who now serves in Benicia Baptist Church. Carpenter went to Loyola University’s school of medicine, served in the Navy, then became a doctor. A Christian, Carpenter sought to express his faith by serving where a need is great.
He found that opportunity in Tanzania, where he and his wife, Deborah, who also is a doctor, began caring for people who had no physician near their home.
Carpenter’s Uzima Clinic-Hospital serves a territory that may be 20 times that of the geographical area served by the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek. But unlike that hospital, which has 1,000 doctors, the Uzima Clinic-Hospital, about 90 minutes from Dar es Salaam, has only one, Henning said.
“He starts at 7 a.m.,” Henning said. “He sees 70 to 100 or 150 a day. He leaves when he’s done.”
Often when Carpenter leaves, he’s on his way to see more patients, at their villages.
Carpenter travels to seven other communities, sometimes by Jeep and sometimes by plane because there’s no other way to reach the people who live there.
When he arrives, he may spread out a blanket, and that becomes his temporary clinic, Henning said.
“Joel is teaching women from the various outlying communities to be midwives, so they can go back to their communities and help women have safe deliveries,” Henning said.
Carpenter is in Tanzania to stay, Henning said. The two doctors have 7-year-old twin sons, Scott and Jayce. “The family is there,” he said.
But sometimes Carpenter gets to travel. The doctor visited Benicia this month, addressing Henning’s church and talking about the clinic’s needs, both for staff and equipment. “He is trying to find people to support the clinic,” Henning said.
The clinic’s operations already get support from Benicia Baptist Church and smaller churches of many denominations throughout the United States. But it always is in need of upgrades as developments produce newer and better tools.
For instance, Carpenter said doctors in the U.S. have portable electrocardiogram machines that can be plugged into a laptop computer. He could use one of those in his practice, Henning said.
Carpenter also could use more and better-trained staff, such as another doctor who could allow for a rotation of schedules or work at the clinic when he’s away. Right now, when he’s not at his clinic his trained nurse practitioner takes over, Henning said.
Carpenter practices general medicine, but his version of “general medicine” goes beyond how that phrase is defined here.For example, because there are no dentists he often is called on to pull teeth — about 300 a year.
Whatever is needed, he does, Henning said.
The clinic’s nurses have training comparable to licensed practical nurses here, but Carpenter would like to have a registered nurse who is willing to go to Tanzania and train the staff in more advanced procedures.
He also would like a dozen dentists to visit Tanzania, a different one every month, so some of his patients’ teeth can be repaired and preserved.
Carpenter’s wife worked with him from 2004 to 2007, then earned her master’s degree in public health so she could join the Tanzania branch of the Centers for Disease Control, working on HIV issues.
“HIV is a big worldwide concern, but much more on the African continent as it is here, due to lack of money for the expensive medicines that are available in the United States,” Henning said. “For that reason Dr. Deborah’s work at the CDC is crucial to the health of the communities where they practice.”
Her career lets her teach preventive measures to the people her husband’s practice helps.
Henning said that during Carpenter’s visit, he described the extreme poverty he has seen in Tanzania. But there are qualities in that country Carpenter has learned to appreciate.
“People are more important. People value each other. People are important, not stuff,” Henning said.
As an example, he said, someone may be late for work. But under the Tanzania value system, it is more important to stop, greet and talk with someone than it is to get to work on time.
While some African countries are struggling with religious conflict, Tanzania has a found a path of co-existence, Henning said.
Christians are a minority; at least 90 percent of Carpenter’s patients are Muslim.
The country’s leaders have developed a method that encourages peaceful co-existence. “They recognize the two religious factions,” Henning said. If a Christian president is elected, the vice president must be a Muslim. If a Muslim becomes president, the vice president must be a Christian.
“It keeps the peace,” Henning said.
At Uzima Clinic-Hospital, “People know he’s Christian,” Henning said of Carpenter. But he is a doctor first.
“They know he’s glad to treat him. There is no animosity.”