The Gambia is a poor, small country in West Africa in which day-to-day life is a challenge. Healthcare services available there are only a fraction of the services available in even the smallest towns in the United States. I imagine that conditions in most of Central Africa are similar to those in The Gambia. In 2006, David Levine, DO, a family physician from Washington State, volunteered for 1 year to provide medical care for the people of this country. The life journeys that eventually led Dr Levine to Africa help us understand why he did this. As is clear from reading his book Toubab: An American Doctor in West Africa (originally published in 2008 and republished with amendments in 2010), Dr Levine has a huge social consciousness. In the book's introduction, he writes of his early experiences as a physician doing volunteer work at the Hôpital de Luperón in the Dominican Republic in 1992:
Toubab means white person in the language of West Africans. Dr Levine's book is in the form of a diary that tells the fascinating story of what he, as a toubab, experienced in Africa. He was assigned to the emergency department of the major hospital in The Gambia. His text relates numerous insightful experiences of friendships, cultural collisions, sickness, frustrations, heartbreak, anger, happiness, and much more. A couple examples follow:
Toubab is embellished with many black-and-white photographs of people and scenes from The Gambia. These pictures strongly connect the reader to the story in Dr Levine's journal.
Dr Levine continues to help the people he worked with during his year in The Gambia. He has established West Africa Medicine and Education (WAME), a nonprofit program to help support medical care and general education for West African children. The book notes that all profits from the sale of Toubab will be donated to WAME. Buying this book will help these kids survive a difficult life.
My recommendation is to buy Toubab and read it, and then try to picture yourself living in such poor conditions. You will leave Dr Levine's story with a greater appreciation for what we have in the United States, despite all the distractions that we're experiencing in medicine today.