Korean hospital provides hope to Cameroonian immigrants

Recently, a healthy baby girl was born to a Cameroonian asylum-seeker couple at the George E. Doty Memorial Hospital in Seoul.

Kedis Kome, the father of the newborn, believes he and his wife Marieclair Njie Ebenye were lucky to find the hospital, which provides free medical treatment to marginalized people like them.

"It is difficult for me to imagine how I will take my daughter back to the same cruel place, in case things don't turn out the way we planned," the jobless father said, referring to his and his wife's refugee status application in Korea, for which they are still waiting for the result.

Their baby was delivered hours after Ebenye got a shot to facilitate childbirth, as she was already six days past her due date. Kome never left her side from the moment they arrived at the hospital, tending to her as she endured labor, which began around noon. He heaved a sigh of relief after his wife delivered their second child without any major problems.

The couple's journey to Korea began last year when Ebenye, then Kome's girlfriend, fled Cameroon for fear of a forced marriage to a community elder. Kome said following her father's death, Ebenye's extended family discussed her future and decided to marry her to a community chief as his third wife, in accordance with African traditions. In Cameroon, forced marriage still exists, and community chiefs, called "fon," are allowed to have many wives.

"At that time, we were already together," Kome said. "She couldn't accept (her family's decision to marry her off) and came to Dubai to meet me. Then, I was working as a guest worker there."

Kome was searching for ways to be able to live together with his girlfriend in a foreign land and concluded that they must seek asylum. "In Dubai, people don't take in refugees, so we tried to find other countries that accept refugees."

The couple's first child is now in Nigeria, where he was taken by Kome's mother. Kome, who has been jobless for the past 10 months since he and his wife arrived in Korea, is worried about his family's future. The couple barely makes ends meet with the money sent every now and then from his family in Cameroon.

Since its establishment in 1982, the Doty hospital, named after its American benefactor and tucked away in the city's residential northwestern district of Eunpyeong, offers hope to sick and poor people who have no one else to rely on. The late George E. Doty, a partner and the financial controller of investment bank Goldman Sachs, donated $1 million to the hospital project after hearing from American priest Aloysius Schwartz about the poor health status of some 2,000 Korean boys and girls attending the vocational schools run by the Catholic foundation Sisters of Mary in Seoul.

Over 3 million of the poorest of the poor have since benefited from the hospital, including some 7,000 babies who were born there.

Sister Kwon Clara, the head of the Sisters of Mary Seoul branch which oversees the Doty hospital, said patient demographics have significantly changed since the mid-2000s, and many poor immigrants and refugees have started seeking the hospital's free medical services.

According to her, many poor patients flocked to the hospital in the 1980s and 1990s because medical services were not accessible to them at that time. Universal medical insurance was introduced in Korea only in the early 2000s.

"Our hospital was always crowded with patients, and their numbers went far beyond our capacity. So we had to screen the patients," she said. "We interviewed patients and their family in advance to check if they really needed our help and had no family to pay their medical bills. If there were any adult children who could pay their sick parents, we told them to go to other hospitals for poor citizens."

Things have changed a lot since the 2000s after the compulsory medical insurance was introduced, which made medical services affordable for ordinary citizens. Kwon said large hospitals have also begun to establish their own charities to lend a helping hand to poor patients.

"These meaningful developments together have resulted in a decrease of patients in our hospital. We took this as a very positive change because a decrease of patients means fewer needy people," she said. "Around that time, we began to discuss whether the Doty hospital should downsize or not in an effort to divert our financial resources to other charitable purposes."

Ultimately, however, Doty did not downsize because a new group of patients have started visiting it from 2004 — foreign workers, female migrants and even refugees, who all live with a poor social safety net.

Some 39,000 patients from 91 countries have benefited from Doty hospital since 2014. "Their nationalities vary, and some of them came from the countries that I haven't even heard of before," Sister Clara said. "Among the inpatients, many are here for childbirth."

Her 30 years of service there are full of heartwarming, and what some would say miraculous, stories. According to her,, some of those who got help from the hospital later became donors, staff or social workers there themselves. Some of the beneficiaries visit the hospital with their now adult children, who were born there decades before.

"I remember one of them donated their monthly salary to us to express his gratitude for performing surgery on his mother some 20 years ago," Sister Kwon said. "Many of the women who delivered their babies here said thank you again and again until they left the hospital. They knew this hospital was with them and helped them when they were going through probably the toughest days of their lives."

She said the immigrant patients are likewise very grateful, giving the hospital staff thank- you notes to express their gratitude. In a two-page letter, an Indian man said his wife got free medical treatment at the hospital, and he appreciated the hospital staff for their warmth. He and his wife came to Korea because their parents didn't approve of their marriage.

Sister Clara said all those heartwarming stories were possible thanks to Rev. Schwartz and the hospital's late benefactor, Doty.

"Mr. Doty was a warm person," she recalled. "He was here several times after the hospital opened. After his death, his son and daughter started helping us." Doty died in 2012 of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 94.

"When he was alive, Father Schwartz told me that Mr. Doty was an aspiring philanthropist and had a plan to establish a charity just like Sisters of Mary to help the poorest of the poor," Sister Clara said. "Father Schwartz advised Mr. Doty to remain a generous donor because he appeared to be more talented in making money than being a charity worker. Father Schwartz then told him that he himself would take care of the poorest of the poor with Mr. Doty's donations."