Earlier this week, AKWorld had the honor of welcoming Dr. Jack Hickel to speak with our members and guests. Dr. Hickel also graciously shared his story with nearly 200 students at Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School, encouraging them to find their passions and do good in the world.
Through pictures and stories, Dr. Hickel shared his story of traveling to Old Fangek in 2007 and finding a single, 10-bed clinic that was always at capacity, meaning that most people who needed treatment were placed on the ground outside. If an IV bag was available, it would be hung from the nearest tree branch. Cholera and typhoid fever were constant threats due to the lack of sanitation, as was malnutrition.
In answer to this, Dr. Hickel returned to Alaska and co-founded the Alaska Health Project South Sudan (AHPSS) with the goals of raising money to help build medical clinics and infrastructure, develop clean water sources, support farmers to meet nutrition needs, and to provide training to locals for long-term sustainability. This is exactly what the group has been doing for the last nearly 20 years.
AHPSS has trained locals to operate, drill, and, most importantly, maintain the over 120 water wells that donors to AHPSS have funded. These wells bring clean sources of water to scores of villages and thousands of people, which in turn has dramatically decreased the instances of diarrheal diseases in these areas.
They’ve built, and re-built, clinics where local or foreign organizations can provide medical care.
They’ve trained locals in agricultural practices so that through the all-local agriculture council, others can learn how to grow not only enough food for their families, but also enough to sell when harvests are good. Little things like providing foot-pumps to get water from the Nile a few hundred feet back, rather than relying on women and children to carry buckets of water, make a tremendous difference in the lives of thousands.
All of this through obstacles that would, and do, cause many organizations and individuals to walk away – clinics being burned, generationally-high flooding, the civil war that created the state of South Sudan, and then the ensuing civil war being tribes within South Sudan. Yet through it all, AHPSS has persevered and learned to do things better – like elevating water well platforms above flood levels so that even during floods, clean water is an option. Dr. Hickel remains incredibly optimistic about the work AHPSS continues to do and the impact that they are having on thousands of lives.
Dr. Hickel’s presentations were a sobering and inspiring reminder of the effort that hardworking humanitarians like Dr. Hickel and the Alaska Health Project South Sudan put into improving the lives of individual human beings who are otherwise largely forgotten about.
Thank you to the Alaska Health Project South Sudan and Todd Hardesty for bringing this program to AKWorld.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jack Hickel is a family physician and tropical medicine specialist with more than four decades serving underserved communities around the world. His broad experience includes medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics, emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and public health.
He spent 16 years in Eswatini, Africa, serving as Chief Medical Officer of the country’s largest hospital and Medical Director of a rural hospital and 16 bush clinics. He also served for several years as the personal physician to the King of Eswatini. After leaving Africa, he spent 24 years in the Alaska Native Health System.
In 2008, Dr. Hickel co-founded the Alaska Sudan Medical Project, renamed the Alaska Health Project South Sudan after the country gained independence. Working in remote and impoverished villages along the Nile River, the project is creating lasting improvements in health, clean water, food security, and community development impacting tens of thousands of people.
