An idealist finds her spot
Some say Katherine Fallon reminds them of a young Thomas Durant, and that might be the best credential she could have later this week when she travels to war-shattered Sudan.
Fallon, a 25-year-old nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, is trading a life of comparative professional luxury for six months of humanitarian work in one of the world's truly beleaguered places, and she sounds like she couldn't be more excited about it.
''I had my heart set on going to Africa," she said last week. ''I've always wanted to do this."
By ''this," she means practicing her profession in refugee camps in western Sudan. The need for medical help is overwhelming, and she and her colleagues will be providing medical care and, equally important, training Sudanese to care for themselves. As she puts it, it's following the old theory of teaching a man to fish.
Fallon is the third winner of a fellowship established in honor of the late Dr. Thomas Durant, the assistant director of MGH and a man who brought medicine to troubled spots around the world.
Durant died in 2001, but his legacy has lived on through the Durant Fellows program, which recruits young doctors and nurses to do the kind of work Durant did for decades.
''Tom was a man who believed that individuals could make a difference," said Dr. Lawrence Ronan, a staff physician at MGH who is the director of the Durant Fellowship. ''It's a wild dream, if you want to call it that. He thought individuals could make a difference in dire circumstances. He would be in Darfur right now, no doubt about it."
The Durant fellows are selected by a panel of judges who consider both the skill level and the personality of applicants, mindful that this kind of assignment isn't for most people.
''They represent the best of all of us," Ronan said of the three fellows so far. ''They are our best idealists. They're young, determined, giving, and sacrificing. I'm very proud of Katie."
The camps Fallon will be working in have been exploding with new refugees recently. They suffer from a range of maladies related to malnutrition and infectious diseases. Women's health is an especially intense issue, Fallon said. After a generation of genocide and civil war, the plight of the Sudanese is drawing increased attention around the world, but aid workers on the scene still have plenty to do.
Fallon said she has long wanted to do humanitarian work, but her nursing career was something of an accident. The daughter, sister, and niece of nurses, she entered college determined to find another path. It didn't work out that way. One day, in a conversation with her father, she described the qualities she was looking for in a profession. He pointed out the obvious: that she had just described the life of a nurse. A term in Peru whetted her appetite for combining medicine and activism.
''Once you do this kind of work, you can't get it out of your system." she said. ''It's interesting to go to a place where there is such desperate need."
Asked how her tour in Darfur will be different from working at MGH, she let out a laugh. Virtually everything about it will be different. ''There, it's going to be just down to the basic nursing skills. I think the biggest need there is just getting them clean water."
Fallon leaves later this week. Another fellow, Grace Deveney is already in Sudan, though they will not be working together. The fellowship's first recipient, Dr. Kris Olson, served on the Thailand/Burma border in 2002. Amid the resources of MGH, Fallon said she looks forward to the challenge of caring for a different population under very different circumstances.
''I know I'm going to get an amazing experience," she said. ''The part that excites me is seeing a new culture, and seeing how lucky we are."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker @globe.com.
