There was a knock at the door.
“If you are the doctor and you have medical supplies you need to come with me,” said the priest from Goma, a ravaged city three hours away by bus, just across the border in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. “We have a cholera outbreak.”
Dr. Sylvia Esser-Gleason has worked the emergency rooms of various Dayton-area hospitals for the past 25 years and currently practices at Fort Hamilton in Hamilton. She also competes in grueling, 50- and 60-mile ultra-marathons and once was a world-class cyclist.
With such a background, the 49-year-old doctor figured she had experienced some of life’s most intense situations.
And yet she had experienced nothing like Goma.
A mother of three who, with her husband, John, lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse west of Dayton on Infirmary Road, she was travelling last November with her daughter, Mary, a Chaminade Julienne High School grad attending Ohio University.
They boarded a bus jammed with humanity and belongings and headed northwest through the lush green hills — where gorillas live in the wild — until they got to the DRC.
“At the border, we had to cross on foot,” Esser-Gleason said. “We had just left all these white-washed stucco buildings and tourist hotels around Lake Kivu in Rwanda and all of a sudden — after walking through a no-man’s land — we emerged ... in hell.
“The city of Goma is bombed out. The roads were muddy and filled with debris, craters and blown-up cars. People were everywhere living in the streets.
“U.N. peacekeepers with tanks were at the intersections. We were picked up in a four-wheel drive charity vehicle. On its side was a picture of an AK-47 with a line drawn through it, meaning ‘no arms on board.’ ”
In the past dozen years, according to the Project Congo Web site, the two Congo Wars and their aftermath have claimed close to six million people, making them the planet’s deadliest conflict since World War II. Every month now it’s estimated another 45,000 die, half of them children younger than age 5.
Once known as Zaire, the DRC is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi and has 66 million people. Most speak French, nearly half are Catholic, all are poor.
And in the country’s lawless eastern regions — especially around Goma, which also was battered by the nearby Mt. Nyiragongo volcano that sent a river of lava 7-feet deep through the city a few years ago — chaos reigns.
Almost two million refugees from the ethnic violence in Rwanda have crowded into camps around the city. Fighting continues and so does the systematic rape of the area’s women — and now men — by guerilla troops. According to the Daily Nation newspaper, 1,000 rapes have occurred in the eastern part of the country in first three months of 2009.
Esser-Gleason and her daughter were taken to Don Bosco Ngangi, a 10-acre compound run by the Salesian Catholic order that helps refugees, orphans and war victims. It has a small hospital staffed by one full-time doctor — Dr. Joseph Muyumba — who along with treating the malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS that ravages the populace, was getting 250 new cholera patients a day.
Muyumba gave Esser-Gleason a crash course in treatment capabilities at the hospital — where equipment and supplies are almost nonexistent — and then said: “OK, now this is your hospital. Do like you would at home.”
Fast, fresh, fearless
Esser-Gleason said her children — 20-year-old Sean, 19-year-old Mary, and Lizzie, an 18-year-old CJ senior who is the Eagles’ top cross country runner and has over a 4.0 grade-point average — “say they have an eccentric mom.”
Another CJ student, senior volleyball player Rachael Bridgman, called Dr. Esser-Gleason “pretty intense,” — an understatement.
Chuck Bridgman, Rachael’s dad and the CJ cross country coach, echoed his daughter, saying Esser-Gleason “goes through life by what distance runners call the 3Fs — fast, fresh and fearless.”
Certainly Esser-Gleason embraces life to the fullest.
The daughter of a Dutch father and French mother — whose own dads were noted physicians — she graduated from Oakwood High, Wright State and Ohio University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine.
It was through her next-door neighbors — a family from Burundi — that her interest was drawn to Africa. She then met George and Joan Riess, two of the founders of the Dayton-based Bridge to Rwanda, which funds orphanages there.
In 2007 — accompanied by her son — she went to Rwanda to work with the orphans. Last November she had returned to do the same when she got that knock at the door.
“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a missionary or wanting to save the world or anything like that,” she said with a shrug and a faint smile. “I didn’t find Goma, Goma found me.”
And once it did, her wheels began turning ... nonstop.
“My mind plays out like a 3-D chessboard,” she laughed. “I can’t sit still.”
She pointed to the small TV sitting cattywampus on a living room counter, not far from a room filled with guitars and other stringed instruments that she makes and plays.
“That’s the only TV in our house and nobody ever watches it,” she said. “There’s just too much else going on.”
That’s especially the case since she’s been to Goma, a point heart-wrenchingly underscored when she took out some photos.
She handed you a picture of a severely malnourished 13-month-old child named Ivote who came to the center weighing 3 pounds. It just looked as if skin were pulled over a tiny skeleton.
Then she handed you another photo of him in the arms of his mother after several months of care. He looked more normal.
“That’s what can happen when a child gets treatment,” she said. But her smile faded quickly when she took out another photo of a small child sitting in an orange washtub.
“This is Vanqueur,” she said quietly. “I was working with him when I had to return to Dayton. He was 3 years old. Someone had poured acid down his throat. His esophagus was scarred. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat. We couldn’t get a feeder tube down his throat and they didn’t have the nutritional IVs they needed to give him enough calories.
“If he were back here, it would have been no problem. We would have scoped him, he’d have had a feeding tube and we would have fixed his esophagus.
“That wasn’t possible there ... and he died right after I left.”
Getting the word out
On the bus ride back out of Goma last year, Esser-Gleason said she just kept thinking, ‘I’m not done with this. I’ve got to follow through.’
“I figured there were two things I could do — get some equipment and supplies and get the word out. All those people dying and no one back here knows anything about it or why it’s happening.
“They tell you it’s an ethnic war, but it’s also about a mineral resource called coltan used in cell phones and computers. We need it, so we’re helping fuel the fight over it.”
She started Project Congo, a 501(c )(3) charity to raise funds for life-saving medical equipment and supplies for Don Bosco Ngangi. She launched a Web site www.projectcongo.org that explains the situation and tells people how they can help.
She also began speaking on the subject and it was after a talk at CJ that she was approached by Rachael Bridgman.
“She’s a pretty fine young woman,” Esser-Gleason said. “She wanted to do something and she followed through.”
Bridgman lobbied her dad to make Project Congo the beneficiary of the annul CJ Varsity versus Alumni (and Others) Cross Country Race — called the Lucas Pfander Memorial Run — Aug. 15 (5:30 p.m.) at Triangle Park. Anyone can run for a minimal fee.
Esser-Gleason said the big thing on Aug. 15 will be raising awareness — which often pays surprising dividends.
Bridgman’s aunt, Dr. Anne Reddington, has given medical supplies and funds. The West Chester Twp. fire department has donated 35 oxygen canisters. The Sharonville fire department is considering donating an ambulance. A Cincinnati company gave 30 computers.
The VA Medical Center in New Orleans provided medical equipment — including a pair of X-ray machines — donated but unused after Hurricane Katrina.
Later this month, her son Sean will take their garage full of supplies — much of it bought by Esser-Gleason herself — by truck to New Orleans, where, with the rest of the stuff, including a CAT scan machine, it will be loaded into containers and sent by ship to Africa.
Although she said her husband worries about her safety, Esser-Gleason will return to Goma for a month at the end of this year — this time working with better equipment — and in years to come, she hopes to become more deeply involved in Project Congo.
“I keep going back to that bus ride out of there last year,” she said quietly. “I wanted to stay and help. I know what I’m doing is just a tiny drop in a bucket, but I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.
“I truly believe that the smallest act of kindness can be worth something. Even if just one person is consoled through this, then you’ve done something for your fellow man.”
About the Author