of national parks.
The couple landed at Entebbe, Uganda’s principal airport, which is perched on the edge of Lake Victoria just thirty-five kilometres west of the capital, Kampala. Looking across the lake, Lucille could see the distant peaks of the Ruwenzori Mountains, more often known as the Mountains of the Moon. Uganda was just as Piero had described it – a land of the most breathtaking beauty.
On the airport tarmac, the Union Jack flapped in the breeze and reminded visitors that the country had for many years been a colony of Britain. But the next year, in October 1962, the colony would gain its independence and the people of Uganda would finally run their own country. The excitement was palpable.
Brother Toni Biasin, one of the Italian Comboni missionaries, known as the Verona Fathers, met Lucille and Piero at the airport and drove them into Kampala. They found it to be a dynamic modern city, built, like Rome, on seven hills. There were handsome shops and large banks, an abundance of restaurants and cafés and huge stately mansions. Flowering trees and brilliant red poinsettia shrubs lined the wide avenues, and street vendors manned stalls laden with pyramids of fresh fruit – mangoes and pineapples, grapefruits and papayas.
The couple spent their first night in Kampala, and early the next morning, Brother Toni packed them into his old Peugeot and they set out for the long drive north. On the outskirts of town, Lucille spotted the signs of poverty that would become all-too-familiar: long stretches of flimsy shacks housing large extended families all jammed together under one shaky roof. Never before had she seen people living in such basic conditions.
The three-hundred-kilometre journey north would take them most of the day. Along the way, they passed hectares of deep green banana trees and huge coffee plantations that stretched as far as the eye could see. On the roadside, women in long multicoloured robes walked with babies slung on their backs in a hammock-like shawl. Some balanced giant water jugs on their heads while schoolchildren skipped along beside them, their bulging schoolbags strapped to their backs.
The farther north they travelled, the more barren the land became, eventually turning into rolling savannah – parched grasslands dotted with skeletal trees. Soon, they began to see tiny round huts with thatched beehive domes planted among fields of bamboo and eucalyptus. This was the land of the Acholi, the people they had come to serve
It was dusk when Lucille and Piero finally reached Gulu, a town of 40,000 people. Here, they turned off the main road and drove another ten kilometres until they saw the small sign to St. Mary’s Hospital. “I have never felt so far from civilization,” Lucille said. “It seems strange to have a hospital in such a remote corner of the land.”
They passed through the gate and into the compound where three Acholi drummers beat out a noisy welcome. Sister Anna Pia, one of the team of Italian Comboni missionary nuns who ran the dispensary, stepped forward to greet them. She took Lucille by the arm and showed her to their residence, a small building with a wraparound veranda. “This is where you will be staying,” she told Lucille. Piero would sleep in another building.
Before nightfall, Sister Anna Pia gave them a tour of the facility. The “hospital” consisted of one small building with only forty beds. Four nuns, a nurse, and a midwife ran the outpatient clinic, and a maternity unit housed half a dozen newborn infants.
That first night, as she was unpacking her bags, Lucille’s head was spinning with excitement. Before she went to bed, she sat down and wrote to her sisters:“I always thought that all of Africa was a jungle so I was very surprised to find a forty-bed hospital at St. Mary’s mission. For a population of 40,000, I am practically the only surgeon able to do certain operations. Fortunately, I brought all my surgery textbooks. It is very stressful but at the same time it is fascinating because I have the possibility of doing so much for these people”
The next morning, as Lucille walked over to the clinic, she passed a long line of patients who stood silently waiting for treatment. She set to work right away. She started off by visiting a small ward with twice as many patients as beds and began her examination rounds, carefully checking each person in turn. Suddenly, Sister Anna rushed in. “Dr. Lucille,” Dr. Lucille, “she cried. There’s a young pregnant woman who went into labour twenty-four hours ago. It’s her first child and I think the baby is lying crosswise in her stomach with its head on the left. I’m worried that we will need to operate to deliver her baby.” Lucille examined the woman and found that she would indeed need a Caesarean delivery. “Could you show me where the operating theatre is?” she asked.
“Sorry, Doctor,” Sister Anna replied. “We don’t have one.”
Lucille was in a panic. Her first thought was to pass the job to someone else. Then she remembered that there was no one else who could do it and that she was the only surgeon in the hospital. She asked the nurses to lay the patient on the table in a corner of the maternity unit and prepare her for the operation. Lucille then had another frightening thought: I have never done a Caesarean operation! She had observed them at medical school and had read about them in her textbooks but she had never actually performed the operation. For a split second, she was frozen with fear.
She knew that there was no alternative but to try. “I know I have to do it” she told herself. She dashed over to the residence, dug out her medical textbooks, and quickly scanned the pages describing Caesarean deliveries. Then, still clutching a book, she returned to the patient. She scrubbed her hands, donned her rubber gloves, surgeons cap, and mask while Piero gave the anesthetic. The textbook instructions swirled around in her head as she began the delicate operation.
“First, I am going to make an incision into the woman’s abdomen so that I can move the baby’s tiny head into position,” Lucille explained as she precisely made the small incision. Then, very carefully, she reached in and slowly eased the baby out. The tiny body was all pink and greyish and covered in blood. Horrified, she thought, My God, he’s dead! After a few seconds of anxious silence, the baby opened his mouth and gave a piercing squeal. It was the best sound she had ever heard.
The operation was a success. Lucille had delivered a healthy baby boy and the mother had come through it well. With a sigh of relief, she wiped the perspiration from her brow and collapsed in a chair.
Before she left that night, Lucille recorded details of the operation in the hospital’s ledger, adding her initials, L.T. She had completed her first operation in Africa.
Lucille kept the young mother in the ward for several days to make sure there were no complications. When the woman was ready to leave, she wrapped her new baby in a shawl and slung him on her back. She then approached Lucille, cupped the doctor’s hands in hers and said “Apwoyo” – “thank you” in her Acholi language. Lucille struggled to hold back her tears.
Lucille’s days were long and full. She spent most mornings checking the long line of outpatients who waited outside her small office. In the afternoon, she performed a non-stop succession of operations in her makeshift operating theatre, which was little more than a table and a single flickering light bulb. Drugs and antiseptics were scarce. There were so few instruments they often had to be re-sterilized during an operation. Conditions were, at best, basic.
“It seems as if all Africans are sick,” Lucille wrote to her sister, Lise. “Most of them have malaria… Its difficult to care for the local people because you cannot question them. They do not know their age and they have no idea of time. They tell us that they have been sick for two weeks but it could have been two days or two years.”
Lucille
