Medical Matters Pat HarroldThe surgeon was obviously the heavyweight on the interview panel. "I see from your application form," he growled, "that you spent a student elective in Africa. What did you get out of that?" "Malaria," I proffered hopefully. Experience with the VSA (Voluntary Services Abroad) tended to be like that.
When we returned from what was then known as the "Third World" some consultants looked on the experience as a summer on the doss, others as a sign of undoubted sainthood.
VSA was a Galway university group that sent students abroad. The medical students who volunteered tended not to think what they could "get out of it". In our innocence, we wanted to give. While there were undoubted attractions in going to Africa there were also undoubted attractions in not going.
We could, for instance, have gone to America and made some money. Or we could have spent time in an Irish hospital gaining experience and making contacts for future employment. But for various reasons every year about 20 eccentrics would volunteer to go to an undeveloped country, usually in Africa.
Dr Don Colbert, a veteran of many a famine and trouble spot, benignly oversaw the proceedings, arranged our flights and gave us our injections. But he was not the only expert about.
Before Bono and Bob, we had two world-class figures in the fields of development and government aid in NUI Galway. One, Michael D Higgins, was one of the best loved academics in the college. A kindly man, he was always available and enthusiastic for any student endeavours.
The other was a governor of the college, Bishop Eamon Casey. He was also a hugely important figure in raising consciousness about poverty and injustice in the developing world.
I will never forget his great enthusiasm, charisma and generosity with his time.
To get anywhere we had to raise money. This we achieved with the usual discos and concerts, but in Galway the main fundraiser was the bed-push. If you were travelling by car between Galway and Limerick any St Patrick's weekend in the 1970s and 1980s you may have encountered a band of wild-eyed students pushing a hospital bed and rattling buckets of coins.
We looked like a Jack B Yeats painting of a bunch of gypsies on their way to the fair and it was actually a great way of letting off steam before exams, covering 20 miles a day at a fast trot.
Next time you meet your staid hospital consultant, look closely and you may see shades of the laughing youth who danced up to your car and shook a bucket for funds to "Help the Third World".
Even then some of us felt uneasy using that phrase. Some would argue that VSA and its equivalents are simply a means of supplying exotic holidays for middle-class kids at the expense of public donations.
Furthermore, the scale of human suffering in Africa is so vast that a few medical students can't do much to alleviate it.
It is true that the few people whom I treated in that far-off summer were merely a drop in a huge ocean.
However, they were as entitled to have their suffering eased, even if temporarily, as anyone in Ireland.
We were often welcome pairs of hands to those brave medics who spent their working lives in deprived areas. And we generally brought a decent supply of medication from the local chemists with us. We delivered aid straight to the people.
The experience changed us. We returned and saw the wasteful, materialistic modern world with new eyes.
It was the first, but not the last time in many people's lives that they acted locally and thought globally.
Dr Mary Jennings did stalwart work for Medicin Sans Frontiers in Rwanda and shared in a Nobel prize. Dr Maura Connolly is a leading figure in the World Health Organisation (WHO). Her job is to go to the most dangerous war-zones on earth and co-ordinate medical aid.
Dr Mike Ryan, the youngest director of WHO to date, leads the world-wide fight against pestilence. Whenever Sars, Ebola or Avian Flu threaten the human race, Ryan orchestrates the defences.
I remember all these remarkable people. When you consider their contribution it may be fair to say, if only for that, it was all worthwhile.
Pat Harrold is GP with a practice in north Tipperary.