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healing kadi FOUNDATION
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HEN DR. JOSEPH DUMBA LEADS HIS MEDICAL MISSION TRIPS TO SOUTH SUDAN THROUGH HIS OMAHA-BASED VENTURE, HEALING KADI FOUNDATION, IT’S PERSONAL.
Dr. Joseph Dumba, Methodist Physicians Clinic doctor grew up in the same deprived, warravaged area, Kajo Keji County, that his mission teams serve. His father, siblings and their families still live there. His parents were subsistence farmers. As the oldest child he worked the fields before school. He grew up in a mud hut with no electricity or running water. Despite the struggles his folks paid for his and his siblings’ education. Life was interrupted when hostilities between government and rebel forces reached deep into southern Sudan. Dumba fought in the civil war that forced his family into a Uganda refugee camp. He ended up in a Kenya camp. The war still raged.
graduate training Alegent Health hired him in 2004 and then Methodist in 2010. The Omaha church he joined soon after moving here, Covenant Presbyterian, did mission trips to Nicaragua he went on. In 2007 he led his first South Sudan mercy mission through Covenant. He’d long wanted to aid his countrymen. “I was looking for that opportunity,” he says. His resolve grew after his mother fell ill and died in the bush. No doctor was around to treat her. He vowed to help prevent such tragedies. He has by providing care to thousands via the Healing Kadi Foundation he formed in 2009. Its South Sudan clinic opened in 2013. Last spring, KETV reporter Julie Cornell and photojournalist Andrew Ozaki accompanied Dumba for a documentary, Mission to Africa, profiling the foundation’s work serving what Dumba calls “the poorest of the poor.” The film shows the arduous life of residents who line up to receive care at mobile clinics conducted by Dumba’s team in remote villages. Most patients have never been seen by a doctor before. Women, many widowed from the war and raising children alone, present chronic illnesses from their backbreaking work.
When peace came in 2005 refugees returning home found conditions little improved from when they left. Dumba’s persistence to make a better life brought him to America in 1990, where he followed his dream to become a physician. He initially resettled in Tacoma, “I think the documentary really did Wash., where he put himself bring some light to how things are,” through college and medical school. says Dumba. “It’s had tremendous impact, especially in bringing He and his wife, Sabina, a fellow some awareness.” South Sudan native and advanced practice registered nurse, began a He says donations to Healing Kadi family on the west coast. are up since the doc aired last year. The couple have three children. The film doesn’t skirt showing Dumba came to the Midwest for how tough things are. Cornell was his residency. After completing struck by the contrasts of a
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metroMAGAZINE • JAN 2014