Rev Dr R.L. MacCabe, Carmelite Missionary

Carmelite missionary Fr Robbie MacCabe recently launched his book Desert Nomads in which he shares his experiences of working for 30 years in the Turkana desert in Northern Kenya. Joe Humphreys reports:

Poisonous snakes, scorpions and crocodiles are but a few of the daily hazards faced by Fr Robbie MacCabe as he travels through the Turkana desert in Kenya in his “mobile medical unit.” That is a fancy name for a 1965 Landrover with no power-steering and a shot gearbox, a few bottles of medicine, a nursing assistant and the veteran “Father Doctor” — or “Doctor Father” — himself.

MacCabe studied medicine in U.C.D. (University College Dublin) before joining the Carmelite Order, and taking up one of the toughest missionary postings in Africa. Working in an extremely isolated, hot and dusty climate, he provides care to Turkana’s nomadic people who can be found dotted around the desert — often in small settlements, hours apart by road.

Drought is a constant hazard, and every decade or so there is a famine. “The Turkana people suffer a lot. If they get one meal a day they are very pleased,” says MacCabe. “If you said to them, ‘How are you keeping?’ They would just say, ‘Akoro’, which is their word for hunger.” The climate and poor living conditions in the population of 200,000 — spread over an area around the size of Ireland — conspire to generate a wide range of diseases, including cholera, malaria and trachoma. Some of these are being tackled with improved hygiene and public health (in the case of trachoma, eye inspections at school have helped to reduce the rate of infection). But new threats are filling the void, among them kala-azar, which is spread by sand flies and is usually fatal without treatment. The disease, which was first identified in India, is formally known as visceral leishmaniasis but better known by the Hindi translation of “black fever” — so called because of the darkening of the skin. Studies say it affects “the most impoverished people in the most remote areas”, and it claims the lives of an estimated 50,000 people a year worldwide. “We used to have only one or two cases; then six, seven. Now we have 13,” says MacCabe. The treatment costs about €150 per person — a huge outlay in a region well below the poverty line. So, while back in Ireland for a short visit, McCabe is contacting pharmaceutical companies to see if he can access cheaper product.

A visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Fr MacCabe has also just published a textbook for nurses, doctors and other practitioners who might find themselves working in a setting such as his. Desert Nomads: A Study of the Pattern of the Turkana People of North Western Kenya, which was officially launched at the College in September 2009 by Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin, details the wide range of medical conditions he encounters, and how best to treat them.

MacCabe, who was born in 1926 in Mallow, Co Cork, and grew up in Sandycove, Co Dublin, comes from a strong medical background. His grandfather was knighted for his medical services to the Crown, while his father — Colonel Fred MacCabe — was both a physician and a horse-trainer (he trained Orby, the first Irish horse to win the Epsom Derby in 1907). During Colonel MacCabe’s childhood, the family was closely associated with the famed English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived in Dublin for a period.

As a medical student, MacCabe contracted TB and promised his brother, a Dublin diocesan priest, that if he survived the illness he would join a religious order. He first worked in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) but was forced to flee political violence there before going to Kenya, where he has spent the last 30 years. While he enjoys his annual trips home to Ireland, he says he feels Turkana pulling him back all the time, and he hopes to live out his life there.

Thinking again of his kala-azar patients, he says, “I could not rest here just comfortably knowing there are 13 patients and we have medicine for two. Are the other 11 going to pass away? I have a sort of feeling I must get back and do the job.”

Fr MacCabe’s own health has suffered in the desert. Some days he goes hungry, and he has caught malaria a number of times. Once, when it was “touch and go”, he sent out word to another doctor — who didn’t arrive for 36 hours, by which stage McCabe had managed to treat himself.

But life in Turkana has its consolations. He says he enjoys swimming in the lake — “when there are no crocodiles”. Becoming more animated, he adds: “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 says, “do the Turkana people use the same word “akuj” to describe both the sky and God.”

Donations can be made to Fr MacCabe at the Turkana Fund, c/o Prior Provincial, Carmelite House, Gort Muire, Ballinteer, Dublin 16, Ireland.

Taken from: Carmel in the World, Volume XLVIII, Number 3, 2009.

On June 3, 2010, Fr MacCabe was honoured by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland who conferred on him the Degree of Doctor of Medicine, honoris causa. The text of the citation can be read here:  RCSI MacCabe Citation 2010