Living up to her name

Even though Dr. Mercy Obeime was born, raised and educated in Nigeria, she nearly cut herself off totally from her native country. By 2001, she and most of her family had moved to the U.S., and Obeime was making what she expected to be a final visit to Nigeria. But it was on that visit when the country’s desperate health care crisis showed her its tragic face.

Dr. Mercy Obelme

“I went to see one of my medical professors at his office. He was not there yet, so I was waiting for him when a man carried in his sick wife. In Nigeria, you have to have money up front to get treated, and he was desperate because he had been out looking for money all day, and then came back to find his wife even sicker,” says Obeime, whose medical practice is located at St. Francis Hospital’s Neighborhood Health Center on South Madison Street in Indianapolis.

“My professor was not there, so I tried to help the woman. But just as I was preparing her for examination, she died, right in front of me. I’m pretty sure she was just dehydrated from another illness and she went into cardiac arrest. She would have lived if her family had been able to afford treatment earlier.

“I was very upset. I’m a doctor, but here in the U.S., patients don’t just die in my office. Then her husband tried to run away with her body, because he was afraid someone would ask him for money to bury her. As he ran away, her little son was running beside him, holding his mother’s hand and saying, ‘Mommy, I’ve been telling you I am hungry all day and you have not fed me. I need some food!’”

Obeime is no stranger to seeing the primary medical care needs of the poor. Even so, she was crushed by the experience in Nigeria. Her frustration increased when her former professor returned to his office and shrugged off the incident.

Obeime had just witnessed a common phenomenon in Nigeria: a preventable death occurring because the victim was too poor to afford medical care. It was business as usual for a country where the World Bank reports the life expectancy at 45 years of age, and two of every 10 children die before age 5. “After that woman died right in front of me, and I saw everything else that was going on, I asked myself, ‘What can I do?’” Obeime says.

Inspired in part by IUPUI political science professor Scott Pegg and his wife Tijen, who asked their wedding guests to forego buying gifts in favor of donations to their adopted Nigerian village (“Chief of Light,” NUVO, Oct. 9, 2002), Obeime launched her own Mercy Foundation with a 40th birthday party that raised the organization’s first $15,000.

Then, the Indiana doctor who thought she would never return to Africa led the Mercy Foundation’s first trip to Nigeria in January 2004. She and her husband Chris, also a physician, led a team of volunteers who traveled to the village of Uromi and treated thousands of people. During that and two subsequent trips to Nigeria, they have given HIV tests, performed surgeries and lent support to an orphanage where many of the children have lost both parents to AIDS.

In the plight of those AIDS orphans, Obeime found distressing evidence of a persistent AIDS stigma in African communities where lack of treatment makes an HIV diagnosis a death sentence.

“If one parent dies of AIDS, and the other dies soon after, the people pretend they don’t know the kids are even in the house. Because they know the parents died of AIDS and they are scared the kids will give them AIDS.

“We see patients who think that arthritis is the result of a curse, so what are they thinking when a person just wastes away? They think a god is killing him for some bad thing he has done. So part of our medical education is to let people know that this is not due to witchcraft.”

Obeime has not stopped at providing education and treatment to individual patients. Increasingly, she is an advocate for the world community and the Nigerian government to address the systemic causes of the suffering she treats. At the invitation of Bono’s DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) group, Obeime attended the July G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where the world’s wealthiest countries reached an agreement to cancel $60 billion in debt owed by the world’s poorest countries to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Fund.

Obeime freely criticizes both the U.S. for foot-dragging on forgiving loans made to curry Cold War favor with African countries (“The West knew the loan money was not being used for the people, so why did they keep giving the governments the money?”) and the Nigerian government leaders for siphoning off loan revenue and oil dollars without benefit to the country’s poor (“Teachers are not paid, there are no drugs in the hospitals and the leaders have been partying with the money.”).

When she speaks on these issues, Obeime knows that she has extra credibility that comes from being African, a physician and someone who continues to find an inspiring answer to her own “What can I do?” question. Obeime hopes she will soon be one of many with that kind of credibility.

“One of my goals is to encourage people like me, first-generation Africans, to do the same thing I’m doing. It could really snowball — we speak the language, we know the culture, the people trust us and we can make sure they get the treatment we prescribe.”

More leaders like Obeime would be a real boost to the struggle to address the AIDS pandemic, says Dr. Robert Einterz, director of the Indiana University School of Medicine’s program in Kenya providing HIV treatment and prevention. “Mercy is a wonderful example of a person who is contributing both here and in Africa,” he says. “She does so by demonstrating altruism, compassion and integrity.

“In a word, she lives up to her name — a blessing of divine compassion.”