For ten years, Dr. John Campbell and his family lived in North Africa, where rugged mountains fall into fertile plains and weekly markets fill with the noise of bargaining and the smell of fresh bread and spices.
Just beyond the bustle of the coastal cities, the landscape changes quickly. Narrow roads climb into the hills. Small villages cling to the mountainsides. Donkeys share the path with packed taxis carrying families to town. In these places, medical care isn’t a given.
Guided by their faith, Dr. Campbell and his wife felt called to live and work among communities with limited access to healthcare. The government provides basic clinics, usually staffed by nurses who shoulder the weight of entire communities. A physician might appear two or three days a month. Specialists are almost unheard of. Pharmacies carry a small stock of essentials, but if a patient’s needs go beyond that, the nearest hospital is hours away.
For many, the journey itself is too much. “People would sometimes rather stay home than go to the city hospital,” Dr. Campbell says. “They tend to trust foreign doctors more, but mostly they want someone who treats them as if they matter.”
In market towns, where villagers gather weekly to trade grain, spices or livestock, Dr. Campbell and his team set up temporary clinics. The cases are familiar – high blood pressure, diabetes, lung disease – but the stakes are higher. What can be managed in a fifteen-minute primary care visit in Charleston may have gone unchecked for months, even years. A single week of care in one town serves dozens of villages that otherwise go without.
Dr. Campbell learned enough of the local tribal languages to stumble through greetings and questions. “Their eyes light up when I try,” he says. “Just that effort tells them, ‘You’re worth my time.’” Many patients told him their local doctors never lay a hand on them. For these patients, the simple act of listening—stethoscope to chest, hand on the shoulder—was its own kind of medicine.
The families he met stay with him: mothers carrying children up mountain roads, elderly men gripping his arm in gratitude after a blood pressure check, patients returning month after month for someone who remembers their names.
Back in Charleston, when Campbell sits across from a patient, he carries the memory of those faces– the men and women who crowded into borrowed rooms in dusty villages, waiting patiently for hours to be seen.
After a decade of work in the mountains of North Africa, his takeaway is simple but profound: “An investment in primary care and good infrastructure pays huge dividends for a community. When people can be seen in a timely way, when you catch things before they get bad, that changes everything.”
He smiles and adds, “That’s what I try to remember every day.”
Because for Dr. Campbell, whether in the mountains or the Lowcountry, the work of healing begins the same way – attention, empathy and trust.
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