American Doctor’s Mission Keeps Calling Him Back to Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan —  His life is a sweep of recent Afghan history.

Episodically over four decades, as this country’s politics staggered from monarchy to communism to warlordism to religious extremism, California pathologist G. Gordon Hadley has dedicated himself to teaching young medical students in the troubled land.

Now 80, both Hadley and his resiliently cheerful wife, Alphie, who sometimes serves as his lab assistant, are back again. They’re here to help rebuild the Kabul Medical Institute, where the doctor first taught in 1960 at the start of many tours in Afghanistan.

Few Americans can claim such a positive influence on this society. A prominent Afghan physician compares Hadley to Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

“He doesn’t care about politics,” said Dr. Sayed Alef Shah Ghanzanfar, a former lecturer at Harvard University who is one of Hadley’s many admirers here. “Like Albert Schweitzer, he is dedicated to the human cause. He feels that the field of medicine can survive under any conditions.”

Conditions in Kabul, where fourth-year medical students do not even have access to microscopes and entire neighborhoods have been razed by years of conflict, could hardly be worse.

Once Afghanistan’s premier medical college, the institute sits on the western edge of this capital that was devastated by 1993-96 battles between rival warlords.

During the fundamentalist Taliban regime, the institute was regularly raided by religious police, who banned women from the campus and slapped male students around when beards or haircuts did not conform to Taliban standards.

Amazingly undaunted by shifting politics, the Hadleys survived it all, even the Taliban.

“I did get upset when they slapped my students,” Hadley remarked mildly.

Hadley said he felt just as comfortable under the Taliban as he did under Afghanistan’s monarch, Mohammad Zaher Shah, who first invited him to work here 42 years ago. At no time did he feel any danger, Hadley said. “I always say I feel safest between two Afghan friends.”

Deposed in 1973 and living in exile in Rome since then, Zaher Shah is scheduled to return to his country this month. The Hadleys will be here.

The Hadleys are Seventh-day Adventists. The doctor is a 1943 graduate of the church’s medical school at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, Calif., where he served as dean. The couple maintain a home near the university.

They represent a long-standing tradition of overseas volunteer medical service by their church that dates to the 19th century American Medical Missionary College in Battle Creek, Mich., founded by cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg. Loma Linda, which opened in 1905, is the successor to that school.

Missionaries Who Place an Emphasis on Service

Over the last century, the Adventists have sent thousands of trained physicians around the world, from China to the remotest regions of Africa.

But strictly speaking they are not missionaries for their faith, instead emphasizing public service over preaching the Gospel. “If a person asks us what we believe, we tell them,” said Alphie Hadley, “but we don’t sit down and give them Bible studies.”

“Dr. Hadley is a religious person,” said Ghanzanfar, an author and one of Afghanistan’s most respected medical educators. But “he has never been thought of as a missionary. . . . With his deeds he is a missionary of ethics and proper behavior that is necessary for a medical practice.”

Ghanzanfar mentioned a recent incident in which Hadley--frustrated by the lack of resources at the institute--reached into his own pocket to pay for solvents used in treating tissue samples. Students at the Kabul school, although challenged by Hadley’s rigorous examinations, clearly adore him.

“I think he is the best teacher at the school,” said fourth-year student Fraidoon Afzali, who hopes to become a surgeon.

Hadley, who speaks passable Dari, the local language, insists that instruction be in English. “To be good doctors, the students need to be functional in a scientific language,” he said.

The Hadleys first came here in 1960 after a stint in India. They arrived a few months after the young king had shocked Afghan society by appearing in public with his unveiled wife. The act was a signal to the rigid Afghan society.

Soon after that, young Afghan women, emboldened by the symbolic gesture, began attending Hadley’s pathology course. In fact, the doctor had created the pathology department and laboratory at the institute.

“One day the girls just started coming to class,” Hadley recalled. “At first they sat together in clumps. Then if the class was crowded and there were no other seats they would sit among the boys.”

One of the women who attended that first class was Suhaila Seddiqi, now Afghanistan’s minister of public health. In fact, the school is terribly overcrowded today mainly because the 500 women banned by the Taliban from attending are back.

After returning home so that Hadley could take a job at Los Angeles County Hospital, the couple were back in Afghanistan from 1963 to 1964, during which Zaher Shah asked for help setting up a medical school in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Hadley was back again from 1970 to 1973. He left after the king was deposed in a coup.

By then, Afghanistan had gotten into Hadley’s blood.

“I’ve always liked this place. When I’m not here I miss it terribly,” Hadley said. “I tell my friends here I’m neem Afghan--half Afghan.”

He did little work here during the years of Communist rule. But when the Najibullah regime was overthrown in 1992, two of the new warlord rulers, Ismail Khan in the western city of Herat and Haji Abdul Qadir in Jalalabad, asked him to return and help their provincial medical education programs.

Physician Strikes a Deal with the Taliban

From 1994 to 1999, Hadley, funded by a grant from Hong Kong movie mogul Run Run Shaw, headed a new medical education program in Hangzhou, China.

But the Taliban regime, desperate to revive its flagging medical school, asked him to return to Kabul in 2000.

Hadley agreed to return to Kabul under certain conditions, to which the Taliban agreed: teaching would be in English; medical supplies would be imported duty-free; Alphie Hadley could dress in Western style and drive a car; and, in keeping with the Adventist practice, he would have Saturdays off.

With a grant of several hundred thousand dollars and sponsorship by Loma Linda University, Hadley set about rebuilding the institute, starting with a well-stocked library and several rehabilitated lecture halls.

Though Americans were generally reviled during the Taliban period, the theocratic government-by-mullah left Hadley alone to educate. “I thought they were nice guys,” said the contagiously optimistic Alphie Hadley, “but of course we never tangled with them.”

The Hadleys were home in Loma Linda on summer vacation last year when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. When the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan began Oct. 7, his concern was for the safety of his students.

“I prayed for my friends, and I prayed for my students,” the doctor said. “These medical students weren’t interested in the politics.”

To Hadley, the son of an Adventist doctor who ran an inner-city clinic in Washington, each student is a potential healer and educator.

Hadley comes from a generation that memorized poetry. In a recent conversation, he said he draws inspiration for his work from the 18th century poem “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard” by Thomas Gray.

One of the central themes is unrealized human potential, speaking of the common folk in an English country town whose poverty and lack of opportunity held them back.

Sitting in the small living room of his Kabul apartment, Hadley recited from memory his favorite verse:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.