 Alumni
Interviews:
Dan Murphy, M.D.
"All day, every day, I get to exercise compassion
with people who are in as much or greater need than any group I
have ever seen..."
The guerillas came for Dan Murphy (66BS, 70MD) in the middle of
the night. One of their men lay wounded, so they whisked Murphy
to distant neighborhood and put him to work. “All of a sudden
we were told to lay on the floor and be perfectly quiet,” he
recalled. Enemy troops were in the area.
Murphy and his comrades huddled for some 20 minutes until the “all-clear.” “What
if they would have found us?” Murphy asked. The answer: a
firefight, maybe a massacre. Murphy went back to his patient. When
he finished, the guerillas asked if they could take a picture with
him.
It was his first night in East Timor, 1998.
Murphy has been there since, watching the Timorese fight for independence
that ended with a U.N.-sponsored referendum in 1999, the violent
withdrawal of occupying Indonesian forces, the arrival of international
peacekeepers and the birth of one of the world’s youngest
independent nations—now officially known as Timor-Leste.
Today Murphy directs the Bairo Pite Clinic in Dili, where he and
a small staff of nurses, students and volunteers have treated more
than 500,000 patients in the last six years on a budget that hovers
around $30,000 annually. The shooting stopped long ago, but the
struggle continues.
“All day, every day, I get to exercise compassion with people
who are in as much or greater need than any group I have ever seen,” Murphy
said, describing the few perks of his work. “Secondly, I
get to be a doctor. Hardly any paperwork. No lawyers. No HMOs.
I worry about people who are sick.”
Murphy is driven by a fierce dedication to the poorest of the
poor, but he’s hardly an idealist. Pragmatic, shrewd and
a little world-weary, he does what he can—patching up wounds,
rationing drugs and, a few times a year, hustling for support around
the globe.
Originally from Alton, Iowa, Murphy was a Vietnam-era medical
student convicted for resisting the draft. A sympathetic judge
spared him jail time, so Murphy set out for California, joining
Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker’s movement and getting
his first real practice experience in an affiliated clinic.
After six years, he briefly returned to Iowa, then headed to Mozambique,
a one-time Portuguese colony that had just attained independence.
Within a few years, his hopes for the fledgling nation sank as
a campaign of violence supported by neighboring South Africa and
Rhodesia erupted.
“My nurses were being butchered, and programs I set up in
villages destroyed. It got to be too much. Plus, I had small kids
at the time,” Murphy said. He and his family came back to
Iowa and settled in Cedar Falls, where Murphy practiced sports
medicine at the University of Northern Iowa and worked in a methadone
clinic.
But as his children grew up, Murphy felt a familiar itch. He’d
been following East Timor, another former Portuguese colony invaded
by Indonesia in 1975. Since then, perhaps a third of the Timorese
population had been killed, but political shifts in Indonesia brought
new hope that the region might win its freedom in the late 1990s.
The place seemed perfect to Murphy.
Upon arrival, it was clear he wouldn’t be just a doctor.
An articulate and passionate Westerner—maybe CIA, some whispered—Murphy
became an international spokesman for Timorese independence. No
stranger to violence, he still found it hard to express the pain
and deprivation he saw.
“I had to search for the words, because I knew East Timor
would be settled in New York at the United Nations, in Lisbon,
Portugal, or in Jakarta, Indonesia,” he said. “I wanted
to stop this suffering I was seeing, to get the word out in the
most dramatic way I could.”
The Indonesian government deported him three times, finally in
a sweep of foreigners that preceded the August 1999 independence
vote and that chaos that followed. Murphy returned with U.N. peacekeepers
and joined the rebuilding, which would include efforts to create
a health care system virtually from scratch.
Five years later, fighting the tide of infectious disease, malnutrition,
birth defects and other disorders on a case-by-case, often provisional,
basis consumes most of his work. “You have to be creative.
You have to use your ingenuity all the time,” he said.
Murphy knows the limits of good intentions—relief efforts
stifled by bureaucracy, plans that sound good on paper but fail
in practice, physicians lured by pay over principle. And he’s
not particularly optimistic about humanity and its future.
But in the here and now, he remains driven by basic principles
that have shaped his life and work. “You really can’t
go wrong if you look to the most needy and try to have an impact
there,” Murphy said. “I don’t see how anyone
could fault that as a guiding philosophy.”
For more information
about the Bairo Pite Clinic or to reach Murphy, please visit
www.bairopiteclinic.com |
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