Westerners have a long history of aiding developing nations through mission work.  Sometimes though the assistance that Americans or others from the Western world provide can appear to be coming from a colonial mind space and consequently the recipients can be made to feel less than.  That’s why what Dr. Joseph Dumba does through his Healing Kadi Foundation’e medical mission trips to South Sudan is different.  Dumba lives in the States, with his wife and children in Omaha, Neb., where he practices family medicine, but he is a native of the very South Sudan area that his medical mission trips serve.  He was and will always be a Sudanese and he infuses the work that he and his teams do there with cultural sensitivity.  In the following Metro Magazine piece I profile Dumba and the work of his foundation.

Journeys

Healing Kadi Foundation

Joseph Dumba and his Healing Kadi Foundation Make Medical Mission Trips to South Sudan

A U.S. doctor brings relief to his African homeland

When Dr. Joseph Dumba leads medical mission trips to South Sudan through his Omaha-based Healing Kadi Foundation, it’s personal. The Methodist Physicians Clinic doctor grew up in the same deprived, war-rabaged area, Kajo Keji County, his mission teams serve. His father, siblings and their families still live there.

His parents were subsistence farmers. As the oldest child he worked the fields before school. He grew up in a mud hut with no electricity or running water. Despite the struggles his folks paid for his and his siblings’ education. Life was interrupted when hostilities between government and rebel forces reached deep into southern Sudan.

Dumba fought in the civil war that forced his family into a Uganda refugee camp. He ended up in a Kenya camp. The war still raged.

When peace came in 2005 refugees returning home found conditions little improved from when they left. Dumba’s persistence to make a better life brought him to America in 1990, where he followed his dream to become a physician. He initially resettled in Tacoma, Wash., where he put himself through college and medical school.

He and his wife, Sabina, a fellow South Sudan native and advanced practice registered nurse, began a family on the west coast. The couple have three children.

Dumba came to the Midwest for his residency. After completing graduate training Alegent Health hired him in 2004 and then Methodist in 2010. The Omaha church he joined soon after moving here, Covenant Presbyterian, did mission trips to Nicaragua he went on. In 2007 he led his first South Sudan mercy mission through Covenant.

He’d long wanted to aid his countrymen. “I was looking for that opportunity,” he says. His resolve grew after his mother fell ill and died in the bush. No doctor was around to treat her. He vowed to help prevent such tragedies. He has by providing care to thousands via the Healing Kadi Foundation he formed in 2009. Its South Sudan clinic opened in 2013.

Last spring, KETV reporter Julie Cornell and photojournalist Andrew Ozaki accompanied Dumba for a documentary, Mission to Africa, profiling the foundation’s work serving what Dumba calls “the poorest of the poor.” The film shows the arduous life of residents who line up to receive care at mobile clinics conducted by Dumba’s team in remote villages. Most patients have never been seen by a doctor before. Women, many widowed from the war and raising children alone, present chronic illnesses from their backbreaking work.

“I think the documentary really did bring some light to how things are,” says Dumba. “It’s had tremendous impact, especially in bringing some awareness.”

He says donations to Healing Kadi are up since the doc aired last year.

The film doesn’t skirt showing how tough things are. Cornell was struck by the contrasts of a country rich in beauty yet beset by suffering and hardship. She says Dumba’s “spirit, calm and sense of purpose” impressed her, adding, “It’s clear that faith guides and directs his life.”

Dumba says everything’s in short supply in South Sudan, even things taken for granted in the States, such as medical syringes and gloves. What’s disposable here is reused there. Nothing’s wasted.

“We’re so far from being able to provide the most comprehensive care but at least we’re there to provide some of the most basic things they don’t have.”

The foundation’s set up a permanent clinic containing everything from x-ray machines to a surgical room. Thousands of dollars in medicines are brought over each trip, much donated by Omaha families and organizations.

In addition to doctors, nurses and pharmacists, the team includes prayer ministry members, mental health professionals, educators, water purification specialists and financial literacy experts.

All the foundation’s work depends upon donated time, expertise, money and supplies. Everyone pays their own way.

“All of us doing this do it on a volunteer basis,” says Dumba.

Healing Kadi hopes to build a roof atop its open-air clinic to better shield patients from the elements. Dumba says the foundation also hopes to construct a patient admitting structure and a hydration station. A longer term goal is building an acute care hospital. Dumba says there isn’t a single intensive care unit in all of South Sudan. The sickest patients must go to hospitals in more developed border nations.

In late March Dumba will lead a seventh mission trip. He and his team. including colleagues from Methodist, will put in grueling hours.

“We work for five days, very intensively, Monday through Friday. They’re long days. We work from sunrise to sundown until we can’t see anything. Then we go back to where we base and there we find patients also needing care, so sometimes we work until 10 or 11 pm. Then we just go to sleep and wake up and start all over again.”

Sometimes I think what did I get myself into because you think you’re making progress and you hit a standstill. But then God opens the door and you move forward.

~ Dr. Joseph Dumba

As the film details, Dumba is welcomed as a hero and his team  accorded great respect. Expressions of gratitude abound.

Dumba says his greatest satisfaction is “people coming to the clinic and saying, ‘Thank you for being here.’ The clinic is delivering care to thousands who wouldn’t have had any care at all. They don’t have anywhere else to go.” He knows the missions are making a difference as more and more people come for treatment.

“The last trip we saw about 10,000 patients, averaging about 2,000 a day, and even with that we’re not able to see everybody.”

Patients are required to pay a small fee or to barter, he says, in order to “empower” the people to be self-sufficient in the future.

He arrives in advance of his team to arrange logistics. As a well-placed South Sudan native, he’s able to cut through red tape.

“I know most of the leaders in the country. It makes things a lot easier. When my team arrives at South Sudan airport the appropriate authorities have already been informed and all the proper paperwork has already been sent ahead so that my team can quickly pass through to start work.”

He says his country’s “very slow” rebuilding can be frustrating.

“Sometimes I think what did I get myself into because you think you’re making progress and you hit a standstill. But then God opens the door and you move forward.”

It’s then he’s reminded how far South Sudan and Healing Kadi have come in a short time. He and Sabina have helped put all but one of his siblings through college and all are productive citizens today.

He’a also reminded how simple health care can be.

“It’s like a relief. You don’t have paperwork there, you don’t have computers, all you do is just take care of patients. You talk to the patient, examine the patient, find out what it is, write down the diagnosis and medicine, that’s it.”

As the film depicts, physically touching patients is a big part of the healing delivered. Dr Jim Steier, who’s been on several mission trips, says, “It’s not only the medicine…it’s the people” that stand out.

Dumba says everyone who goes is affected.

“The doctors who go with me come back with a different perspective.”

Trip veterans return humbled by the experience and grateful for what they have. They think twice before throwing something away or complaining.

Julie Cornell was impacted, too. She senses the film she made affects viewers the same way. She says she finds “intensely satisfying” the film’s “ability to move people, open their minds and call them to action.”
Dumba likes that it paints a vivid but hopeful picture of his homeland’s struggles and of his foundation’s efforts to address some of the needs.

To get involved with the foundation’s work or to make a donation, visit http://healingkadi.org or email info@healingkadi.org.