News
Transforming Lives In Malawi - In giving, Rumson physician receives
By John Burton
RUMSON - Dr. Murray Treiser has been given a gift, a wonderful and unexpected gift, and one he got while giving.
"I realize now there are no coincidences in life. I was given this opportunity and this challenge for a very specific reason," the doctor said recently as he talked about the joy and fulfillment he has found doing volunteer work in a small, impoverished African nation.
Treiser, who lives in Rumson, is a plastic surgeon by training and had offices in New Brunswick and Red Bank when he retired due to a disability. But in 2006, through his involvement with the Kabbalah Center, a Jewish spirituality program, and because of a friend who was involved, Treiser became aware of the philanthropic organization Raising Malawi. And it has been because of that group and his work with it, that Treiser said his life has been transformed.
Malawi is a landlocked country in South Central Africa, bordering Mozambique on the east and Zambia on the west, and has the dubious distinction of being named as the poorest country in the world by the United Nations.
Malawi is a peaceful country, not torn apart by tribal warfare or civil unrest, like so many other of the continent's nations, and it also has no natural resources, like gold or oil, to attract outside attention. And because of that the country of 12 million doesn't register much on the global radar. But the situation there, Treiser said, is terribly bleak. The country is wracked by AIDS, with as much as 25-30 percent of the population HIV-positive. There is also a lack of clean running water, which has caused severe outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases, along with severe food shortages and an epidemic of malaria.
The lack of water and food and the prevalence of disease have caused a high mortality rate, leaving many, many children without parents, forcing children as young as four to fend for themselves. It is not uncommon in the country's urban areas to see groups of four- and five-year-old children being cared for by 10-year-old siblings, or other groups just scavenging, looking for whatever food they can find. "It's an incredible, incredible situation," Treiser said. "When you see it, it makes you cry."
Treiser has seen it.
Raising Malawi was established three years ago, and is run by volunteers who raise money and actually go there to do the work to bring clean water, to bring food and to teach agricultural techniques to the locals so they can raise their own food.
The organization now feeds one million children a day, giving them two meals each day, operating an orphanage caring for 80,000 children.
One of the most persistent needs, he said, is for medical attention and Treiser went there for the first time in January, February and March 2008, went again in October and November and hopes to return again in March 2009.
When he goes, it is a chance for him to practice what he calls, "pure medicine," no surgery, but treating hands-on, people who are in such desperate need of medical attention.
When he arrived he would visit a rural village and there would be as many as 1,500-2,000 people waiting to see him. "The line just extends for miles and miles," he said. The cases run from the most extreme, from babies suffering from cholera, so dehydrated that they are literally just hours away from death, to those suffering from sore muscles and aches from toiling in the fields each day.
His time there has been demanding and challenging, as he tried to treat patients where even the most rudimentary equipment is unavailable, where not only would there not be anything resembling an X-ray machine, but even basic medicines, like antibiotics, were always in woefully short supply.
This is a place where just $50 worth of mosquito netting could prevent so much illness and death from malaria, but it was not to be found, he explained.
"But to be honest with you," he acknowledged, "it had been the high point of my medical career to go down there."
After spending his time treating the incredible long lines at a village, Treiser said he would be approached by the village chief who would thank the doctor and present Treiser with the only thing the village had of any value, a cow. "And you say to yourself, 'Can you imagine someone giving to you the only thing in the whole world that they have because they are so appreciative?" Treiser asked.
During his first trip to Africa, Treiser said he underwent an emotional and spiritual transformation. During his first few weeks, he would call home and tell his family he didn't think he could stay and bear it. After that he came to the conclusion that he would stay but he would be glad to leave and go home. But the longer he was there he realized, "I'm really going to be sorry to leave this place."
"You realize that this is how medicine once upon a time was practiced," and it is, in a sense, a stretching of your medical professional chops.
But more profoundly, "They're giving back to me in some special, spiritual way," he noted. "It's almost like you have to thank them for the opportunity to allow you to do it."
For more information about Raising Malawi log on to the organization's Web site www.raisingmalawi.org.
