First crop of doctors graduates
could begin to flip that script — to bring the best care not to those who had the most, but to those who needed it most.
In the early 2000s, with the assistance of Kenyan public health expert Peter Nyarango, the university and the government began setting the course to open the country’s first medical school, beginning with the establishment of a two-year “premed” course for aspiring doctors. The best would be offered bursaries at foreign medical schools.
The first year of that programme, 2003, also happened to be Antindi’s last year of high school. And as he filled out his application to Unam, his pen hovered over the field of study. “At that time, I had still never seen a Namibian doctor, so I had no confidence,” he says.
Still, he decided to give the new pre-med programme a go.
He was rejected.
The problem was his English score. It was brilliant by the standards of the country’s rural north, where almost no one spoke English as a first language, but middling in the eyes of a Windhoek admissions committee.
They had no way of knowing the long, self-taught hours reading novels in the school library that had gone into it.
So Antindi settled for his second choice: a general science degree. He headed for Windhoek, the dream of medical school once again tucked away and forgotten.
And it stayed buried until 2009, white jacket and a sense of authority he never could have imagined as an 11-year-old.
And he brings to work each day a basic skill still rare among doctors in Namibia: the ability to speak to his patients in their first language.
Most must use nurses as interpreters, adding another layer of distance and intimidation to medical care.
On a recent morning, working his rotation in the anaesthesiology department, Antindi chatted easily with a nine-year-old boy preparing for minor surgery.
While the surgeons and nurses crisscrossed the room around them prepping for the procedure, doctor and patient swapped names and home towns — discovering that they came from nearby villages.
“Just breathe deeply,” Antindi instructed in Oshiwambo as he lifted a mask to cover the boy’s face. “Breathe, breathe,” he murmured as his patient drifted towards unconsciousness.
“I feel at home every day I go to work,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to a doctor or a patient or a cleaner — these are my people. I’m at home here.”
For now, he hopes to stay in the region when he finishes his internship at the end of this year. He hasn’t decided on a speciality yet, but he’s leaning towards obstetrics and gynaecology.
He knows first hand, he says, how many women and babies in this part of the country die in childbirth, and it disturbs him. But even more than that, he says, there’s a joy to hearing the first cry of a newborn that he hasn’t matched anywhere else in his medical experience so far.
“It gives me so much pleasure to look at that baby and get to be the one to say: ‘Hello baby, welcome to the world.’ ”