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If you subscribe to the caricature of devout religious believers as mostly sanctimonious hypocrites, the kind who rake in cash and care about human life only when it is unborn, come visit the doctor here.
Dr. Tom Catena, 51, a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York, is the only doctor at the 435-bed Mother of Mercy Hospital nestled in the Nuba Mountains in the far south of Sudan.
For that matter, he’s the only doctor permanently based in the Nuba Mountains for a population of more than half a million people.
Just about every day, the Sudanese government drops bombs or shells on civilians in the Nuba Mountains, part of a scorched-earth strategy to defeat an armed rebellion here.
The United States and other major powers have averted their eyes, so it is left to “Dr. Tom,” as he is universally known here, to pry out shrapnel from women’s flesh and amputate limbs of children, even as he also delivers babies and removes appendixes.
He does all this off the electrical grid, without running water, a telephone, or so much as an X-ray machine — while under constant threat of bombing, for Sudan has dropped 11 bombs on his hospital grounds.
The first time, Dr. Tom sheltered, terrified, in a newly dug pit for an outhouse, but the hospital is now surrounded by foxholes in which patients and the staff crouch when military aircraft approach.
“We’re in a place where the government is not trying to help us,” he says. “It’s trying to kill us.”
Given the shortage of resources, Dr. Tom relies disproportionately on makeshift treatments from decades ago.
“This is a Civil War-era treatment,” he said, pointing to a man with a broken leg, which he was treating with a method known as Buck’s traction, using a bag of sand as a weight.
“Sometimes these actually work,” Dr. Tom said. “You use what you have.” Continue reading
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