CHANGEMAKER A Singaporean surgeon on the front-lines of West Beirut during the early 1980s.
A SINGULAR JOURNEY Dr Ang Swee Chai (Medicine ’73) has taken the road less travelled and helped countless lives in war-torn regions of the Middle East.
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ALUMNUS
Archival photos courtesy of Dr Ang Swee Chai
Dr Ang Swee Chai’s uncommonly strong sense of conviction has led her down a singular path. The first woman to be appointed an orthopaedic consultant surgeon at the renowned St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, Dr Ang has travelled a long road from Singapore and the United Kingdom to the heart of war-torn Beirut. Born in Penang, Dr Ang wanted to become a doctor for as long as she could remember. “I thought that as a doctor, one could do a lot of good,” she recalls. “One day, my brother brought home a biography of Dr Albert Schweitzer [the physician and medical missionary]; I wanted so much to be like him.” After graduating with honours from the University of Singapore in 1973, Dr Ang decided to pursue orthopaedics as her specialty. Among her Singaporean mentors were some of the most prominent names in the field: Prof Pesi Chacha, Dr Kanwaljit Soin and Prof Kamal Bose. In 1974, Dr Ang’s life was to take the first of many turns when she met Mr Francis Khoo (Law ’70). They were
married in 1977 but barely two weeks after the ceremony, Mr Khoo left Singapore abruptly after he was sought for questioning by the authorities about his political views. Dr Ang herself was taken into custody, as were many of the couple’s friends. Within weeks of her release, Dr Ang arrived in the United Kingdom to start a new life with Mr Khoo. With typical determination, she soon became the senior registrar at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospital. In 1982, shortly after seeing an urgent appeal for surgeons to treat civilian casualties in Beirut, Lebanon, Dr Ang felt compelled to act. Taking a leap of faith, she resigned from her job and volunteered her services. “I arrived in West Beirut in the middle of a 36-hour bombing campaign,”
she recalls. “When the bombs stopped, group Medical Aid for Palestinians in we were taken across the lines into 1984. “The Middle East has very much the war-zone.” become a part of my life,” she says. In her memoir From Beirut to In February, on her first trip back Jerusalem (2002), Dr Ang writes to Singapore in 35 years, Dr Ang movingly of the realities of practicing brought with her the ashes of her triage in the refugee camps of Sabra husband, Francis, who had passed and Shatila. Soon after she arrived, the away in the United Kingdom the two camps were destroyed and many previous November. At a memorial of their inhabitants killed. “During service held at the Cathedral of the the massacre, I spent three days and Good Shepherd, the theme was one nights operating in of service before a basement shelter,” “AS DOCTORS, WE self – a principle she recalls. “When that Dr Ang herself ARE PRIVILEGED we were finally embodies. IN SO MANY WAYS. ordered out of the Days before NOT ONLY CAN basement, we saw leaving for the dead civilians all United Kingdom, WE TALK ABOUT around us. My first GIVING, WE ALSO Dr Ang spoke thought was, ‘The at the National HAVE PLENTY world has forsaken University Health TO GIVE.” the Palestinians; System Auditorium Dr Ang Swee Chai the world has to members of wronged us’.” Singapore’s medical Together with several of her fraternity. In the audience were fellow physicians, Dr Ang made professors who had once been her the decision to testify about the teachers as well as junior housemen massacre at the Kahan Commission in their surgical scrubs. Dr Ang noted in Jerusalem, Israel. As a result, her that those who have the capacity to visa was withdrawn and she was make a difference must also embrace forced to return to London. Yet Dr it as their duty. “As doctors, we are Ang’s abiding passion for the Middle privileged in so many ways,” she told East had taken root; moved by the her audience. “Not only can we talk plight of the innocent caught up in about giving, we also have plenty conflict, she helped form the charity to give.”
INTO THE WAR ZONE
Dr Ang remains a fervent advocate of civilian rights in wartime, and in her frequent travels to the Middle East, has found – amid extreme violence and sorrow – moments of love, kindness and grace. One morning in December 2008, after 24 hours of surgery, she stepped out of an operating theatre in Gaza to see an orange tree in full bloom – “a reminder of the love that God has for all of us,” she recalls.
OCT–DEC 2012
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