In Memoriam 1992-1997/Rodney Belcher
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RODNEY BELCHER 1931—1996
This is worship: to serve mankind and to minister to the needs of the people. Service is prayer. A physician ministering to the sick, gently, tenderly, free from prejudice and believing in the solidarity of the human race, he is giving praise.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Dr. Rodney (Rod) Lynn Belcher,‘78 a member of the Ugandan Bahá’í community, was shot and killed on March 11, 1996, in a carjacking that occurred in the parking lot of his office at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.
Little is known of Rods early life. He was born on November 2, 1931, in
Rodmy Belt/aer
'78 Rodney Belcher, MD—photo originally appeared in the ijfi jmmm/ of Bone and join! Surgmy—Amrrimn 1996—1998, March 1997, vol. 79—A, no. 3, and is used with permission of copyright holder, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Inc.
THE Bahá’í WORLD
Roanoke, Virginia. He attended St. John’s High School in Washington DC and then moved to Indiana to enter the premedical program at the University ofNotre Dame. He was successful in gaining admission to graduate studies at the University of Miami. While studying there in 1953, he married Dawn A. Dayton, and three years later he was one of twenty-six students graduating with MDs in the Miller School of Medicine’s first commencement ceremonies. Dawn accompanied Rod when he returned to Washington DC to complete an internship at the District of Columbia General Hospital (Georgetown University Residency Program). During this time he was also a flight surgeon in the US Navy Reserve. In 1958 their first son, Christopher, was born. A second son, Mark, followed in 1960, the year the Belchers moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where Rod commenced the orthopedic program at the Mayo Clinic.
In 1963 he opened a private practice in Arlington, Virginia, and took up the directorship of orthopedic education for Georgetown University at Arlington Hospital. That same year Rod was said to have discovered and accepted the Bahá’í Faith.
In 1974 he was granted a clinical assistant professorship as chief of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Arlington Hospital, a post he held for two years. But by this time Rod had had a taste of Africa. He had interrupted his work in Arlington and had taken up the teaching of orthopedics at the University ofDar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1970 to 1972, during which time he revitalized and supervised the trauma unit at Muhimbili Hospital.
The Belchers returned to East Africa in 1983; Rod, having been granted a Fulbright
Fellowship, was then a visiting professor of
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orthopedic surgery at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. One of his students was Dr. Specioza Wandira Kazibwe. At the time of Rods death, she had become vice president of the country, the first woman to hold the position. She represented the national government at his funeral. “He left the beauty of Arlington, Virginia, in the USA," she said, “and came in the midst of gunfire to develop health services in Uganda.” She warmly remembered the encouragement he gave her as she undertook a specialization in surgery—a specialization that was not welcoming to women at that time.
The violence of the Ugandan civil war intensified, and the Belchers were forced to leave in 1985, the year President Obote was overthrown in a coup d’e’tat. Rod completed his fellowship in Kenya at the University of Nairobi in 1986, and the Belchers returned to the United States where Rod assumed the position of chief: of orthopedic surgery at Cooper Green Hospital and Jefferson Clinic and clinical associate professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
They returned to Uganda in 1988, and Rod was the medical director for Health Volunteers Oversees overseeing the USAID—funded “Orthopedic and Physical Rehabilitation Project For the Disabled" at the Mulago National Hospital, which, as a result of the Civil war, was in shambles. He was also appointed professor and head OFthe Department Oforthopedic Surgery at Makerere.
Where the project called for the training of forty Ugandan medical students, Rod, within seven years, met the goal more than tenfold. Where the project called for the provision of one operating theater, he designed and supervised the building of two, described as being the best in subSaharan Africa.
Working with the British Red Cross Society, he rebuilt the Mbale Orthopedic Workshop that had burned down and reinstated programs to manufacture wheelChairs, artificial limbs, braces, crutches, and other equipment for amputees and victims of polio. A year later, in 1992, a school for prosthetic technicians was opened, and Rod was in the process of establishing two other workshops.
While the World Health Organization (WHO) Claimed that there had been no cases of paralytic polio in Uganda since 1979, Rod’s persistence verified the existence of polio virus within a forty mile radius of Kampala and convinced WHO and the Ugandan Ministry of Health to launch massive public immunization campaigns. He was elected chairman of the Presidential Polio Appeal Fund.
He was concerned with extending care to more rural areas and had recently renewed the orthopedic program of upcountry Visits. To enhance the flow ofphysicians, surgeons, and nurses brought into Uganda by Health Volunteers Overseas, he had a safe and comfortable guest house built near the hospital. He and Dawn welcomed many of the medical specialists who came and contributed to the orthopedic training program.
His greatest achievement was said to be the development of a four—year training program in orthopedics leading to a master's degree with standards comparable to the requirerfients of American boards of certification, the first such program in East Africa. At the time of his passing the program had three residents.
His colleagues at Mulago Hospital called him “the Father of Orthopedics in Uganda,” and the orthopedic department was quickly becoming a regional center and Was accepting patients who were victims of wars in Rwanda and Sudan.
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On March 13, 1996, Senator Patrick Leahy
ofVermont addressed the US Senate:
1 was fortunate to have known Dr. Belcher. Seven years ago, shortly after I established the War Victims Fund, a $5 million appropriation in the foreign aid program to provide medical and related assistance to war victims, Rod Belcher signed on with Health Volunteers Overseas. He had lived in Uganda before the Civil war there, and the Agency for International Development sent him back to start a War Victims Fund program to assist people who had been disabled from war injuries. He and his wife Dawn had been there ever since.
There were tens of thousands of amputees, many of them Victims of landmines, without access to artificial limbs. The Mulago hospital and medical school, once the pride and joy of that country, were in ruins. There were not even basic medical supplies. There was not a single trained orthopedic surgeon in the country. The Ugandan Government was bankrupt.
Rod embraced that enormous challenge with enthusiasm, good humor, patience, and a deep, personal commitment to the Ugandan people. Over the years he won the trust and respect of the Ugandan Government and of the successive United States Ambassadors and the ambassadors of other countries who witnessed the impact he was having on the lives of so many people. He rebuilt the orthopedic clinic and trained every orthopedic surgeon in Uganda today.
When my wife Marcelle and I visited Uganda in 1990, Dr. Belcher took us around the orthopedic clinic. We saw what a diiTerence the War Victims Fund had made as a result of his efforts and
THE BAHA’I’ WORLD
the efforts of the Ugandans who worked with him. It was an experience that neither of us will forget. We saw what a difference this one American had made.
Since then I have often thought of that trip, and Rod Belcher became the model for the volunteers that have been recruited for other War Victims Fund programs. He exemplified what we looked for in others. He had a warmth and gentleness, and a commitment to Uganda that was extraordinary . . . For the past seven years he lived and worked in a country where getting even the simplest thing accomplished often required incredible ingenuity and persistence. Rod had both.
At his funeral, Dr. Belcher was honored by the Ugandan Vice President, the Minister of Health, the director of the hospital, the dean of the medical school, the American Ambassador, the British High Commissioner, and many others. The orthopedic Clinic that he worked so hard to establish was formally named after him. The streets were lined with people who knew him personally or had heard of the American doctor who had done so much for the Ugandan people.
Rod Belcher will be terribly missed. But he leaves a legacy that anyone would be proud of. He gave the War Victims Fund its start, and For that I will always be grateful. And he leaves a score of trained Ugandan orthopedic surgeons who loved and admired him, who will carry on in his place.
The minister of health spoke at his service. He said that the Ugandan government was about to designate Rod Belcher as an honorary consultant to the Ministry of Health, the highest honor.
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US Ambassador E. Michael Southwick said, “He was the kind of person who makes us proud, not only as Americans, but as human beings. He transcended nationality. He transcended religion. He represented the best of us. He was the kind of person the world needs, and doesn’t have enough of.”
His wife Dawn, said, “Here, where there are so many people who have so little opportunity, he could, with a single operation, get them walking again . . . He died on the way to doing what he loved.” On March II, 1996, the Universal House of Justice cabled:
DEEPLY GRIEVED BRUTAL MURDER DEDICATED OUTSTANDING PIO' NEER RODNEY BELCHER WHOSE INDEFATIGABLE SERVICES WILL ALWAYS BE LOVINGLY REMEMBERED. SELFLESSLY, ENERGETICALLY AND COURAGEOUSLY, TOGETHER WITH HIS DISTINGUISHED WIFE, HE LABOURED AMONG HIS COMPATRIOTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND WITH EVEN GREATER DISTINCTION SINCE 1970 IN TANZANIA, KENYA AND UGANDA, SERVING THE POPULATION THROUGH HIS MEDICAL PROFESSION AND PROMOTING INTERESTS BELOVED FAITH IN THESE COUNTRIES.
PRAYING HOLY SHRINES FOR PROGRESS HIS LUMINOUS SOUL ETERNAL KINGDOM, AND FOR COMFORT AND SOLACE HIS DEAR WIFE AND MEMBERS FAMILY.
ADVISE HOLD MEMORIAL MEETING HIS HONOUR IN HOUSE OF WORSHIP, ASKTANZANIAN KENYAN NATIONAL ASSEMBLIES HOLD SIMILAR GATHERINGS IN HIS NAME.
More than two thousand people attended his funeral, many of whom filed by his casket in wheelchairs or aided by crutches, canes, or rustic walking sticks. Dr. Rodney Beleher is buried near the Kampala Bahá’í Temple not far from the graves of the Hands of the Cause Enoch Olinga and MLisei Banani.