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Jan 15,2006 - Jan 22,2006 |
12 - Doing the humanitarian Uganda Stomp
Doctor Gino Bucchino transfers his family and talent to the African country
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-22
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Gino Bucchino
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Why a successful physician (and here success is measured in dollars, not just in prestige) suddenly decides to leave everything and go to Uganda as a volunteer is a question many Torontonians posed to themselves when they learned that Dr. Gino Bucchino, a member of our community very well known both in and outside of it, is leaving for Angal, Uganda, with his wife Marisa, a physician like him, and their children Filippo and Carolina, in order to serve as volunteers in that village's rural hospital.
Why go Dr. Bucchino?
"Because I want to be a certain kind of physician."
What "certain" kind?
"One who follows his reasoning. I had the luck to study medicine and get a degree. In those days going to university was really a stroke of luck. I decided to become a physician, in spite of my parent's idea that I was to become an accountant. Call me romantic, but I believe in the Hippocratic oath and in the professional ethics it contains. The ancients spoke of a 'sacrality of the medical art'; I say, more simply, that one has to carry out the choices made to their logical conclusion. And I chose to be a physician. But there's more."
What more?
"This choice of mine, to go to Uganda as a volunteer physician, also has political reasons. I've always felt deeply the suffering of others, and this feeling was strengthened by my years of militancy for the Left. I am a communist, or a post-communist if you prefer, and everybody knows that. I am, and have always been, on the side of the workers, of the proletarians, of those who received very little from life. I thought it fit, then, to give back something of what I received. I morally give back my degree, making myself available as a volunteer physician."
A very respectable position. But someone could call you a demagogue...
"Let them say what they want, the fact is I'm going to Uganda with my family, not sending somebody else."
It will be hard down there.
"Look, a volunteer is not going on holiday. I know all too well that it will be hard. In the small rural hospital of the Combonian Fathers' mission in Angal two Ugandan physicians are already working, and I and other Italian physicians from CUAMM, the Collegio Universitario Aspiranti Medici Missionari [University College for Aspiring Missionary Physicians], will join them. A good number, but down there physicians are always scarce."
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