DRESSED IN a pair of old-fashioned shorts, half-emaciated after another year spent in northern Kenya’s semi-arid desert, Fr Robbie MacCabe did not look like the most intimidating of tennis opponents.
Into his 60s and 70s, he’d climb down off of his racing bike, into the Fitzwilliam club in Dublin or the Rhiwbina in Cardiff, an eccentric-looking old man with a glove on his right hand. The kind of person you’d go easy on, give a couple of shots to, before putting him out of his misery.
And then he’d leather them, running club champions off the court with balls so perfectly placed you could point to a mark on the ground and he’d hit it. The first set might be close, but after that men a third his age would be worn out, going down 6-0 6-0.
If people stared he might tell them that he had been the 1944 Irish junior champion, who went on to play at Wimbledon and might have gone further if the TB hadn’t got him as a medical student at UCD.
But then Fr MacCabe, who died last month at the age of 83, was an unassuming man, a Carmelite missionary and qualified doctor with a shyness that belied a fierce determination to succeed, whether on the tennis court or Turkana, one of the world’s most unforgiving environments.
For over 30 years, he worked in this part of northern Kenya, running a mobile medical unit that he said was just a fancy name for a 1965 SUV with no power-steering and a shot gearbox and a few bottles of medicine.
Born in Mallow in 1926, Robert MacCabe grew up in Sandycove in Dublin, the latest in a long line of doctors. His grandfather Patrick, a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons, was knighted for his medical services to the crown. His father – Col Fred MacCabe, a veteran of the Boer War and the first World War – worked as a doctor in the newly established Free State army. The horrors he had witnessed made an impression on his son, who abhorred violence.
MacCabe became a keen athlete, taking to tennis, cricket and swimming. He studied medicine at UCD, but after contracting TB, underwent enforced seclusion for six months. He told his brother that if he survived the disease he would join a religious order. Four years after qualifying as a doctor, he was ordained as a Carmelite priest in 1960.
Fr MacCabe was awarded the Gold Medal by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1972 and the degree of Doctor of Medicine by University College Dublin in 1973 for a dissertation on the “Study of the Pattern of Diseases among Africans living in Nyamamaropa, Zimbabwe”.
But stationed on the border of Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique at the height of the Rhodesian bush war, he was putting his own life at risk.
Ian Smith’s minority white government in Southern Rhodesia was pitted against Robert Mugabe’s independence movement, who were using Mozambique as a base from which they could launch raids. It was a dangerous time.
He was almost blown up by a land mine while driving to a field clinic. Two colleagues were shot dead. He was finally expelled in 1977 for treating patients considered by the government to be rebels. Having been forced to leave one remote place, he found another one, Lokitaung, west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, close to the borders with Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda.
A hot, hilly area plagued by frequent bouts of drought, Turkana has historically been isolated from the rest of Kenya.
Fr MacCabe learned the local language and established his mobile medical unit after realising that a hospital and fixed clinics would not work, as the people moved from one transient settlement to another.
"The sky in Turkana at night-time is absolutely beautiful because there is no electric light, there are no clouds, and you see the stars spread out over a vast area. Not for nothing," he told The Irish Timesin 2009, "do the Turkana people use the same word, akuj, to describe both the sky and God."
Aid workers come and go, but Fr MacCabe stayed with the Turkana until his very last days, living in a hut with little more than a mosquito net and a fridge, where he kept his medicines and anti-venom serums.
Nine months of the year were spent visiting patients, administering polio, BCG and measles vaccines, caring for people with tuberculosis, Aids and malaria. He carried out baptisms, said Mass and regularly brought the sick on journeys to the hospital in Lodwar that could take eight hours on rough, often impassable roads.
The rest of the year he would spend in Dublin, where he was a lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 2010, he was conferred with an honorary doctorate there.
A much-loved uncle and brother, he spent hours speaking with his nieces and nephews in Dublin and Wales talking about which SUVs he should drive, about bikes and special rubbers to prevent the tyres being burst by thorns in Kenya, about cars he owned and cameras. To many, he was the embodiment of what it means to be human. Some called him a saint.
“I can tell you he was the most caring man to be with and he was really good at making you feel special,” his two grandnephews, aged eight and 11, said at his funeral. “We will miss him.”