As a teenager in war-torn Sudan, Gatbel Chamjock had nothing: no family, no home, no money and, too often, no food. Today, he works as a physician’s assistant for the Colorado Department of Corrections in Sterling, blessed with a wife and two children.
“It seems like I’ve lived life both ways,” he said. “Right now, I’m close to middle class. I have a house, a family, a good job and a good car. I’m comfortable. But it takes the opportunities in America for a poor man to make it.”
The Sudanese community in the U.S. is closely connected. When the people flew in from places like Utah and Illinois.
Chamjock was there too.
He ran into the preacher whom he’d known years ago in a refugee camp in Kenya.
“You would see all these kids running up to girls or drinking beer,” said the preacher, James Chuol Tang. “But I always saw him reading his book. I knew he had a dream, and that the dream would come true.”
In 1991, when Chamjock was 14, Sudan was fighting its second civil war, and the government bombed his town. His uncle was killed, his family scattered, and .
About half died from starvation, sickness or attacks by wild animals. Others ended up as child soldiers.
Chamjock spent about five years in refugee camps. He never saw his parents again.
“My religious faith helped me a lot, especially in (refugee camps in) Ken ya,” he said. “In that camp, people were dying — meningitis, malaria, some would have seizures, then die the next day. So a lot of us were into Christianity and church.”
Tang would begin beating the drum at 5 a.m., rousing people to sing songs and hymns. Chamjock was in his choir.
“You don’t even know what you are going to eat the next day,” he said, “but my religious (beliefs) took me through it. I always had hope.”
In his hometown of Nasir, he was from. His father was a church elder who pushed him to learn English so he could translate the Bible into the Nuer language.
In the camp, he became a translator for Doctors Without Borders, where he decided he wanted to become a doctor.
Medicine, he said, “was like a miracle. Somebody would be sick, then when you gave them medication, they would be alive the next day. I felt like if I studied medicine, then maybe I can be like one of these people who bring people back to life.”
He came to the U.S. in 1995, seeking asylum. He worked as a waiter, applied for scholarships and enrolled at Tennessee State University, where he graduated with a degree in biology in 2001. He’d just started his first semester at Finch University of Health Sciences The Chicago Medical School when disaster struck.
By then, he’d located his family members, including his three brothers and one sister.
“I got news that my dad was killed in a bombing raid back home, and that my mom, because of that death, was severely affected and could not hear.”
He didn’t get many details, just that the family needed money.
“All my siblings were telling me, ‘You are the only person who can do something.’ “
Their father was dead, and the family had no more cattle.
He dropped out of medical school and returned to his old job of waiting tables at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., to help his mother, who later died.
“When I left, I cried while I was driving from Chicago all the way to Tennessee,” he said. “I knew I was giving up my career for my mom.”
After working about a week as a waiter and looking on the Internet, he found something perfect: a clinic for low-income families in Lincoln, Neb., that needed a case manager who spoke Sudanese, particularly Nuer, and had a science background.
He landed the job, moved to Lincoln, and discovered his life’s work: a career as a primary-care physician’s assistant, diagnosing and treating illness.
He is now supporting his three brothers through college, two in Ethiopia and one in Greeley.
, the commissioner of Akobo County — a former Lost Boy of Sudan who became good friends with Chamjock in a refugee camp — reached out for help.
Although 500,000 people live in Akobo, there is only one doctor.
Chamjock put together a medical team, and in March, they flew into Akobo on a United Nations helicopter loaded with medical supplies.
The 58-bed hospital was so crowded that people were lying on the dirt floor or outside under trees.
Joan Martin, a Colorado doctor whom Chamjock met at Sterling Correctional Facility, was on the team.
She heard horrific stories, like that of a woman who had seen two of her sisters abducted, “and her husband killed in front of her, her four children taken from her,” Martin said. “They shot her in the foot, knifed her in the back, and left her for dead. She made it to the hospital, where she had a miscarriage of the baby she had been carrying for seven months.”
Chamjock plans to return to help his people. In his free time, he serves as project manager of Sudan for .
During a 2010 trip to South Sudan with Ron Fleck, a doctor who serves as the organization’s president, Chamjock trained people in village health care from dawn to long past dusk.
A grateful government has given the nonprofit 20 acres of land on the Nile River for a clinic, and Second Hope Ministries is now raising money to build it.
If that happens, Chamjock plans to spend lots of time recruiting doctors. “I am an American,” he said. “Part of me is here, and part of me is over there. If you love me, you’re going to love my parents, my siblings, my people. I feel like an ambassador in my field.”
