Minister's vision from 1892 has evolved
into a modern hospital in Bahrain
By Steve Liewer,
Stars and Stripes
Photos by Jason Carter, Stars and Stripes
The new wing of American
Mission Hospital in Bahrain. |
MANAMA, Bahrain — On a late fall day in 1892, a thin young man of God stepped off
a steamer in the dusty port of Manama, trundling a box of books and a case of medicine.
Newly ordained as a minister of the Reformed Church in America, Samuel Zwemer was fired
with zeal to bring Christianity and modern medicine to Arabia. The calling had come to him
four years earlier as he studied at seminary in New Jersey.
After a long struggle with reluctant church authorities, Zwemer and three religious
colleagues finally won support for their vision.
Within a month after arriving, Zwemer had set up a tiny dispensary in the front of a
one-room flat he had managed to rent. He had studied a bit about medicines and dentistry
in preparation, and soon patients were flocking to the pale-eyed, white Christian who
spoke fluent Arabic.
"He is not really a doctor," Zwemer wrote in his journal after overhearing a
Muslim man speaking of him. "But he can cure fevers and pull teeth without
pain."
Sini-Kuruvilla, a nurse
at the American Mission Hospital in Bahrain, helps an elderly patient in the emergency
room. |
Although Christianity never gained a firm foothold in this land of Islam, Zwemer’s
medical calling did. His box of medicines and his Bible evolved into today’s American
Mission Hospital, a modern facility that still handles about 10 percent of basic patient
care in Bahrain — including many patients from the U.S. Navy’s growing base in
Manama.
The hospital today is run as a Bahraini-chartered not-for-profit agency, with only the
loosest of affiliations to the church that gave birth to it. About a dozen of its staff
members, and only one doctor, are American. But it has kept the name because of the
goodwill it has generated over the decades.
"We’re American by origin, by history, but we’re really a Bahraini
hospital now," said Donald Doenitz, the hospital’s chief administrator and a
U.S. native.
The American Mission Hospital offers services in obstetrics/gynecology, internal
medicine, nutrition, pediatrics, speech therapy, diabetes and dentistry.
In 1989, it opened an urgent-care clinic and expanded to 24 hours a day, though it
refers most specialty and emergency care to larger Bahraini government hospitals.
Since Zwemer’s modest start, the hospital has overcome challenges of almost
biblical proportions to survive.
Anita Thomas, pharmacist
at American Mission Hospital in Bahrain, gives a patient his medication. |
In the early years, it suffered from a powerful suspicion among Muslims. Some of them
believed the clinic to be the source of the terrible plagues of measles, cholera, smallpox
and dysentery that sometimes swept the area, according to a 1993 history of the hospital
called "Through the Changing Scenes of Life."
In 1896, Zwemer married an Australian missionary nurse named Amy Wilkes, and they
became partners in the Manama clinic. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died
within a week during a turn-of-the-century measles outbreak. Zwemer’s brother, Peter,
a medical missionary in what is now Oman, died of heatstroke about the same time.
Often Zwemer and his fellow missionaries feared they would be expelled from Bahrain, or
worse. The British authorities in India, who kept a loose control over their colonial
outposts, opposed Zwemer’s efforts to build a full-fledged hospital. Muslims refused
to sell him land for it. Still, he managed to open one — on the same site as the
current hospital — in 1902.
Somehow, the hospital succeeded and even expanded. But, like many missionary hospitals
around the world, it faced perpetual financial hardship, even into modern times.
Because nearly all of its patients in the early years were poor and could not afford to
pay, it relied mostly on contributions from the Reformed Church in America back home.
Even as both Manama and the hospital grew, the mission could not afford some of the
most modern medical technology. It prided itself instead on its personal service and the
kindness of its staff.
Still, by the 1980s, the church grew tired of the financial burden and divested itself
of the hospital to a volunteer board of Bahraini and American community leaders.
Dr. Timothy J. Boehm, an
American and the Chief of Dental Services at American Mission Hospital in Bahrain, looks
on as Dr Zahra Majeed examines a patient who was complaining of a sensitive tooth. |
"It was just a business decision," Doenitz said. "We no longer get money
or support from the church."
Even some of its own administrators looked at the perpetually sagging bottom line and
thought the hospital ought to be closed, like the other three Arabian mission hospitals
begun a century ago by Zwemer’s missionary friends.
"When I got here [in 1992], this wasn’t much more than a Band-Aid
hospital," said Dr. W. "Butch" Deacon, an ex-Air Force fighter pilot who is
the staff’s orthopedic specialist.
But in the early 1990s, the board decided instead on a major expansion. It instituted
up-to-date accounting practices, and decided to replace the hodgepodge of old buildings
with a thoroughly modern facility, keeping only the historic 1926 structure that is the
oldest are still standing.
With help from Bahraini officials, the American Mission Hospital started the Island
Classic golf tournament as its major annual fund-raiser. Each year, Doenitz said, the
event brings in about 150,000 Bahraini dinars — nearly $500,000 — toward the
construction project. Last year, an administrative building opened, and work will start
soon on a new medical building.
While there are no formal ties between the hospital and the U.S. Navy base in suburban
Manama, top Navy officials such as Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr. have long been boosters.
"The admiral has always been a very good friend of the hospital," Doenitz
said.
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