“What do you do in any walk of life when you’re up against a seemingly insurmountable challenge?” Doctors without Borders Canada founder Dr. Richard Heinzl asked a capacity crowd at Thompson Rivers University tonight as he described an early experience as one of only six doctors preparing to receive a quarter-million refugees at an isolated camp.
The upbeat and unassuming doctor, who speaks five languages and has travelled to 45 countries, shared his solution: “Be unconventional and creative in how you look at the world,” he said, then proceeded to share some startling statistics, telling the mixed audience of students and community members that “Over half the world’s population is under 21, and three billion people in our world have never used a telephone.”
“Poverty,” he stated, “is a lack of choice.” But despite poverty and oppression, children still play and smile, and the people, though illiterate, are highly intelligent. “They are like us, they are with us, they are us,” he said.
Describing his mind-set at an early age as one that couldn’t accept notions of apartheid and racism but came to think of them as being unchangeable because of the acceptance he saw in the adults around him, Heinzl, who later witnessed first-hand population-wide elections in South Africa, said, “All things can transform themselves.”
When faced with a foreign culture, said Heinzl, “It’s tempting to think you know better than other people,” but, he cautioned, “Respect local knowledge. Ultimately it is the local people that it’s all about. Listen very carefully. Local people know best.”
Heinzl lamented that people are dying in Africa because they can’t afford expensive HIV treatments, saying, “you can’t email food or download a cure for AIDS.” But the former CEO of Toronto-based CardioView Inc., an information technology company in the field of cardiology, whose latest venture, MediSpecialist.com, is a project involving the creation of a web site linking doctors around the world, held out hope that “technology is shrinking the globe,” explaining that access to email, now becoming more available the world over, has the potential to save many lives, giving as an example the ability of doctors in remote locations to email digital photos of lab samples for diagnosis by experts far away.
Praising the often underpaid and poorly equipped physicians in parts of the world where he has worked, Heinzl said, “Our local counterparts are the real backbone of what we do,”
“The cornerstone of every single thing we did over there, and really the only hope we had was teamwork,” he emphasized, explaining that the name Doctors without Borders is misleading.
“Doctors are a minority. There are more nurses that go overseas with us, and there are mechanics, administrators, physical therapists. No matter who you are, there is potentially a role for you,” he told a student inspired by his lifetime of dedication to helping people in war-torn and poverty-stricken regions, urging students to “Get a range of skill sets so you can learn to be nimble.”
Since its inception, Doctors without Borders Canada has sent more than 650 medical and non-medical volunteers, including nearly 200 physicians, overseas to the world’s most vulnerable people, and has volunteer-staffed offices in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax and Ottawa.
For more information, please contact TRU President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Roger Barnsley at 828-5001.
For a photo, email bscott@tru.ca
