Floating Doctors

When Benjamin LaBrot was in second grade in Southern California, he told his class that when he grew up he wanted to be two things, a doctor and a marine biologist.  His teacher told him he would have to choose one, but he was determined to combine his love of the ocean with his desire to help people.

He started achieving his goals in junior high school when he worked on sport and commercial fishing boats and the Marine Science Floating Laboratory vessel as a research diver.  This led him to become certified as an emergency medical technician and a scuba diving buddy for divers with paraplegia, quadriplegia or blindness.  And that was only a start for Ben.

Throughout his schooling he and his peers went on personal medical missions all over the developing world.  After college he moved to Ireland and joined the global medicine program at the Royal College of Surgeons.

It was on a particular mission to Tanzania in 2006 that he truly found his calling.  With a backpack full of medicine, he set up under a tree in a desolate and impoverished village in the Serengeti.  A line of fifty patients formed, all of them with a variety of ailments from tuberculosis to lion wounds to common colds.

It was not long before the supplies in his backpack were depleted and the line had only grown longer.   Heartbroken and driven to tears by the fact that he would have to leave patients untreated, he decided then and there that he would never leave a patient untreated, no matter what the circumstances.

In 2008 the group Floating Doctors was established with the mission to bring medical relief to remote coastal communities around the world.  With the realization that approximately eighty percent of the world’s population lives within five miles of the coast, and that access to the poorest communities is often attained by waterways, the group decided to buy a 76-foot sailboat called “The Southern Wind.”  LaBrot now had a “much bigger backpack” and would never run out of supplies again.

In Panama, he with his sister Sky, went to Bahia Azul, a village on the Caribbean side of Panama.  Although Panama is famous for the Canal that connects the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of the world, the ironic truth is that the country of Panama has very little infrastructure.  Roads to the hinterland are poor or non-existant, and jungles bar the way.

In Bahia Azul where their floating clinic boat docks, Ben sees disease symptoms and conditions that have developed far beyond what doctors in civilized areas ever see.  What he can document helps the medical profession back here in civilization.  He showed us a video of a woman patient who had insisted to other clinics that she had something painful in her side that no one could identify.  Ben found and removed a large fragment of a needle.

Ben’s mission is all about access, access to care.  People come to him by pack horse, rope bridges, even primitive dugout canoes. In America, we think we are disadvantaged when we have to drive half an hour to get to a clinic and wait an hour there to see a doctor.   In third world countries that would be a luxury, to see a doctor that quickly.  Panama has a high infant mortality, low life expectancy; women die in childbirth, children have rickets.  The local Indian population is disenfranchised by being unable to reach medical facilities easily.

Ben’s feeling is that a helping hand is not a hand-out.  In Cap Haitian, Haiti, he treated a patient who had suffered bad burns twenty-eight days before.  Ben first had to debride the site of the wound by soaking it and peeling off the gauze bandages that had grown into the site, as the tissue had begun to heal.

Ben treats maladies and accidents, monkey bites, worms, machete wounds.  Often he has to open up and re-stitch previous treatments.    It is, he says, “what I dreamed being a doctor would be like.”  For more information, go to www.floatingdoctors.com, from which some of this information is drawn.  Floating Doctors is also on Facebook.  They are happy to have volunteers, even for half a year, if the person cannot manage to devote a full year.  Every passion and skill can be used. 

Ben shared with the Club that he is getting married this weekend.  Applause.  At the end of Ben’s inspiring talk, President Paul concluded the presentation by saying, “You say you are supported by a lot of people.  Rotary wants to be part of those people,” and presented Ben with a check from the Club.