Baccalauréat · Série D · Anglais — 2022

Text — The doctor who stayed

Doctor Zoungrana could have left. He finished at the top of his class, and two hospitals abroad offered him a post before he had even graduated. His classmates thought he was joking when he said he was going back to the district hospital where he had been born.

The first years were hard. There was one operating theatre for a district of two hundred thousand people, and the electricity failed almost every week. He learned to work with what he had, and to explain to families, patiently, why a child needed to be taken to the regional hospital before it was too late.

What changed things was not equipment. It was training. He began teaching the nurses of the surrounding villages himself, one Saturday a month. Within four years, the number of women dying in childbirth in the district had fallen by half, although the hospital had received almost nothing new.

He is careful when people call him a hero. He points out that a single doctor cannot replace a health system, and that he stayed because his family could support him during the difficult years. Not everyone has that. What is needed, he says, is not more heroes but better conditions.