A Prescription for Adventure
Allan Lewis waited until he was 34 years old before giving up a successful business career to study medicine. But he doesn’t regret the change. His memoir is based on the 13 years he and his wife Connie spent in remote sections of Indonesia where he acted either as a traveling doctor or did research work on diseases common to that area.
Lewis’s first assignment was in Kuala Lumpur where he studied the continual outbreaks of malaria. Later he became the mining camp doctor in Soroako, a newly-built city where the Canadian International Nickel Company was located. Next he and Connie moved to Kupang and worked with USAID and Community Health Improvement Program, Province Specific (CHIPPS). The two spent their last three years at Jakarta, working for USAID.
Lewis and Connie adjusted well to the "clash of cultures" which made up most of Indonesia. On some of his trips to aboriginal villages, he had to compete with the village medicine man, who had healing rituals of his own to perform. At another village, he found that a tiny baby had malaria because the mother had refused to breast feed it. She was unaware that a mother’s milk provides the antibodies which fight malaria. At other villages, impure drinking water often caused sickness if the water was not boiled first. And using unclean knives to cut the umbilical cord of new born babies usually caused infections and a high mortality rate among infants.
The only discouraging encounter Lewis had in Indonesia was in a brief conversation with Prince Philip when he and Elizabeth II visited there. The Prince scoffed, "If you save these people from malaria....they’ll only die of starvation." Another surgeon from Delhi had once asked Lewis, "Why do your waste your talents on such savages?"
But Lewis took these negative attitudes in stride. He was well aware that the armed forces of Indonesia were "ruthless towards the opponents of the government." He was aware that many people were being "hunted down and killed by the government that employed us." He was aware that these people were usually torn between their ancient sacrificial rituals, imposing religions, and a merciless military dictatorship.
A PRESCRIPTION FOR ADVENTURE is an enjoyable account of Allan Lewis’s years as a doctor (1970-80s) in various parts of Indonesia and his and Connie’s new life with Southeast Asian people. The book was printed in 2004 by Morris Publishing.