As promised, Chicago doctor plans to give back to his native Nigeria
He will open a hospital named after his father

Dawn Turner Trice

August 24, 2009

Godwin Onyema
In the late 1950s, Godwin Onyema was a student at an all-boys boarding school in Nigeria. He had a history teacher whose wife was a missionary doctor from Liverpool, England, and assigned to a hospital several miles from Onyema's school.

Because the doctor's husband was a teacher at the school, she came whenever the students fell ill during outbreaks of measles, malaria, chickenpox, stomach flu.

When Onyema (pronounced Un-YEAH-ma) was younger, he wondered why she chose to practice medicine in Nigeria rather than the safe and cozy confines of England. But he thinks about her now when people ask him why a board-certified physician would choose to spend his 40-year medical career working as a gynecologist in small clinics in some of Chicago's most impoverished and gang-infested neighborhoods.

"They also ask me how many times my car has been broken into," Onyema said with a laugh. "I say, 'Never.' I also say that I've taken care of generations of patients: grandmothers, mothers and now their daughters. How satisfying is that? That's why I've worked here."

But "here" isn't restricted to just one place. "Here" can be the facility at 85th Street and Ashland Avenue, where the building, which is currently under renovation, has walls that are crumbling and 1950s-type pale green and powder blue examining tables. "Here" can be the humble apartments of teen patients, where he has on occasion been forced to make house calls.

"There was a time when women or girls wouldn't venture too far from home because they didn't want to cross gang territories," he said. "So, they still needed care and you had to meet them where they were."

Although Onyema performs surgeries and practices in some of the city's most highly regarded hospitals, he said he doesn't believe he would have had the same experiences or influence had he limited his medical career there.

Now at age 65 -- and with his four children out of college, having graduated from Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown and Boston College -- he's preparing to return to Nigeria to open a women's hospital. It would be Onyema's chance to make good on a promise he made to his father in 1974 when he came here to study.

"I married a nurse right before I left Nigeria for Chicago," Onyema said of his wife, Josephine. "The plan was for me to do my residency here and her to get a degree in health administration. We did that. But I also had four children, and I wanted them to have opportunities."

Still, Onyema said, he never lost sight of his promise. Now he and his son, a lawyer, have started the GEANCO Foundation (geanco.org) to raise money to build educational and medical facilities in Nigeria, including the Augustine Memorial Hospital, to be named after Onyema's father. (The foundation's title is an acronym for the first letters in the names of his immediate family members.)

However trying the conditions sometimes have been here, Onyema knows that those in Nigeria are breathtaking. It has the second-largest HIV-positive population in the world and the largest number of AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization. With 1,100 women dying during pregnancy or childbirth for every 100,000 live births, Nigeria has the second-highest number of maternal deaths in the world, second only to India.

Onyema has felt so strongly about providing care for society's least fortunate that he teaches his residents at Jackson Park Hospital the importance of serving the community, in the community.

"I've come to know that the main focus or determinant of good patient care shouldn't be where they live or whether they can pay," he said. "I know that in Nigeria, there will be many more who won't be able to pay than what I've encountered here. We're working on ways of generating income."

Onyema's story feels like it's coming full circle. He will return to the place where he first met the doctor, his role model, who practiced beyond what may have been considered the most comfortable.

"But I'm certain that for her it was the most rewarding experience," Onyema said. "When I started, my feeling about medicine was that I was going into it because I care.

"That's still my feeling today."

good stuff, may GOD bless him

why wont it be refreshing.