The Q & A below took place in September, 2009, with Breckenridge physician Craig Perrinjaquet (PJ). A small medical clinic in the Langtang region of Nepal that was established by Doc PJ in 2006 was the beneficiary of Amazing Grace’s first “Good At The Grace” fundraising day two years ago, which raised $1200 for his work in Nepal.   We hope you’ll enjoy this small glimpse of the good Doc’s good work around the globe.

COMPASSION = ONE SKINNY LOCAL WITH A BIG BIG HEART

Doc PJ, outside The Grace with his trusty steed, in 2009.

What do Tamang tribesmen, bugles, Pygmies and Alexander Graham Bell have in common? Local physician Doc PJ’s goodwill.

Physician and longtime local Craig Perrinjaquet (Doc PJ) pedals into Amazing Grace every morning before work to scarf up a fresh-from-the-oven scone. Then he grabs the bugle that lives on top of the Grace’s aging fridge, leaps out the door, and trumpets out his daily enthusiastic endorsement:  “Fresh Buttermilk Mango (or buttermilk strawberry, or chai chocolate chip ) scones!  They’re really, really, really good!”

Twice a year PJ misses his morning ritual in order to spread a different kind of message. When he boards his flight to West Africa next week, it will be simply one more leg on a long, altruistic journey of extending medical work to communities in need.  He’s worked with refugees in Darfur, with tiny collectives deep in the Honduran jungle, and Buddhist villages in Nepal. For our first issue,  PJ discusses two decades  of dispensing his version of grace.

Much of your volunteer work has been in Honduras.
I’ve been going to Honduras since Hurricane Mitch. Last spring was my 15th trip. I go to a very remote area of the Patuca National Park, near the Nicaragua border, that has no access by road.  So we go by 4WD vehicle, and then mule, and then canoe, and then hike a day or two (through the jungle, by machete) to deliver some very basic health care to people who don’t have access to it.  We provide mass treatment for parasites, dispense Vitamin A, treat whatever acute infections there may be. Provide birth control to women that request it. Prenatal vitamins. Do public health education.  Long term- we’re bringing nurses from the regional health centers out there to do more women’s health care and vaccinations.

My nickname was “El Coleta “- which means the the guy with the ponytail.  I think it took them a couple of years before they knew I was the same white guy coming back. But now they definitely recognize me and are very warm to my returning. It’s very fun.

Can you speak a little about your upcoming trip to West Africa?”
I’ll be going to Cameroon to work with a tribe of Baka Pygmies.There’s a mining company that by law, has to provide some development back to the local community.  And the local community are these 40 to 60 tribes of rainforest people, And they’re tiny.

It will be a bit of a scouting mission to find out what the needs of those communities are, and to find out what resources are available there. And then to help both sides of that equation- the people with the resources, and the people that need them -work out a system where they can be delivered in a sustainable way.
A number of years ago, you worked in Nepal…
About 10 years ago.  Karen Lapides and I went to Nepal, and we worked in the hill country. We had some extra time, and explored up into the Langtang area…and found that they had no medical care either.  And we did a little bit of medical care, a little bit of education, with some Tibetan Buddhist Tamang tribes..

A couple of years later, when they got  a telephone, the only telephone number anybody had was mine.  I felt like Alexander Graham Bell:  I get this call in the middle of the night:  “Hello this is Thiley Lama!  I am calling from Langtang!  How arrrrre you!”   Then, sometime later, another call- asking if I would send his son to medical school.   I thought about it for a about a minute, and then said “Sure. “

I was able to send some money to a Nepali medical school to cover his son’s tuition. His family paid for all his other living expenses. Now, he’s finished his medical school and his residency, and we’ve built a small building in an ancestral home of his great great grandfather to be a clinic.  We’ve rebuilt the home: It’s a very auspicious place for him to use as a clinic to serve the local people.

That’s just been a fabulous project.  It’s kind of been a dream.  When people try to do development, the challenge is always getting the people trained in an area where they are going to want to stay to work.  If anyone’s traveled to a Third World country,  they’ve seen schools and clinics that have been built with good intentions that have been abandoned or are in disrepair – because they haven’t developed the human resources. So to start with the human resources, and then have the local people build the building, has really been a great success story.

And several years ago you worked in the Sudan….
Two years ago I worked in Darfur, which is in the western part of Sudan. I had just come back from Honduras and had read  a book called The End of Poverty. They talk about the  one out of six people who live on less than a dollar a day, people who just have no opportunity to even get a hold of the bottom rung of the ladder to pull themselves out.  I decided I needed to  go work somewhere really really poor, really really bad.

It was pretty bad:  Refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of people: the violence was still fairly
intense.  There were some days when I had to stay in the bunker and couldn’t really go out. It was a fascinating experience for me.  But frustrating  in a way- because of the violence, I wasn’t able to work and do as much as I would’ve liked to have done.  In the middle of a war zone it’s really hard. I mean, one skinny white guy showing up with dental tools to pull teeth isn’t enough;  You need big government interventions to make those kind of changes.  Like United Nations, UN Peacekeepers- on a bigger scale then I can really be involved with.  But, …Pygmies?  A little group of pygmies? I think I can help ‘em a lot. So that’s where I’m headed next!

The goal with all of these projects, really, is to find people within the country that can do the work, and just need a little boost – need a little money from the outside, or a little bit of expertise from the outside. And sometimes, just kind of enthusiasm and encouragement from the outside to create some structure for them to be able to take care of themselves. So. I ‘m always looking for how I can be obsolete ….as soon as possible.That’s really the goal.

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