Despite his nostalgia, Albert was aware that many things at Lambaréné required his attention. He was grateful when a native carpenter named Monenzali joined the team that was rebuilding and refurbishing the hospital. Monenzali had learned carpentry at Cape Lopez and was a skilled worker. His efficient and steady work habits began to rub off on some of the local workers, much to Albert’s delight.
At last everything seemed to be going well, and Albert looked forward to devoting his evenings to reading and writing. But as the unrelenting summer heat began, twin disasters struck the Ogowe region. The first was an epidemic. At the start a few people from upriver timber camps began showing up at the hospital with stomach cramps, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea. Since these were common symptoms of tropical illnesses, Albert took samples of body fluids and studied them under his microscope. He detected the thin strands of bacteria that were the telltale sign of dysentery.
With the discovery, Albert knew that the medical staff needed to act quickly. Dysentery was incredibly contagious, and without fast action, it would spread throughout the hospital. To combat the disease, people throughout the local area were encouraged to drink and cook with boiled water. But old habits proved hard to break, and many people continued using unboiled river water. It was frustrating when someone came to the hospital with a different illness, only to end up catching dysentery and dying. Would it be better if we closed the hospital down altogether? Albert pondered, though he knew that wasn’t the answer.
The dysentery epidemic finally subsided, but not before killing thousands of people. Then a second disaster loomed. Since locals had been unable to plant crops during the extended wet season the year before, food staples were in short supply. Albert had foreseen this and stockpiled as much rice as possible at the hospital. This supply was used to feed the medical staff and supplement the patients’ diets. The locals were also depending on rice, which they procured from merchants, as their main food staple. But when a ship carrying thousands of tons of rice destined for the area was shipwrecked and the rice ruined, the merchants had no more rice to sell, and hunger and famine spread. Albert did what he could to help, using the Tack så mycket to transport as much rice to the local villages as he could spare.
French schoolteacher Emma Hausskneckt arrived at Lambaréné in October 1925 to assist Emmy Martin with hospital administration. This brought the total number of European hospital staff to six. With three extra women the hospital began accepting newborn babies who had nowhere else to go. Twins born in Gabon were particularly vulnerable. Many people believed a mother could only pass her spirit to one child, which meant that in the case of twins, one baby was obviously an evil imposter. Since no one could tell which twin was which, both were often cast aside to die. The babies of mothers who died giving birth or soon after often met a similar fate. Witch doctors called orphaned babies cursed, and no other mother wanted to take on the role of breastfeeding a cursed newborn. Thankfully, a new product, canned evaporated milk, could be bottle-fed to babies to keep them alive. Albert ordered a shipment of evaporated milk from France, and the women at the hospital took on the task of bottle-feeding and saving the lives of the babies left with them.
By late 1925, the hospital was completely rebuilt, along with a ward for European patients. This meant that Albert no longer had to give up his bedroom when a timber merchant or missionary needed ongoing medical attention. The hospital even had two small cells to house people so mentally tormented they were a danger to themselves and their families. Before coming to Africa, Albert hadn’t considered the possibility that native people would struggle with mental illness. He soon discovered it was a grim fact of life for them. His first encounter with an African person with mental illness was N’Tschambi, a giant of a man. He had been delivered to the hospital in chains, and Albert was informed he’d killed his wife with an ax in a fit of rage. If the hospital did not take him, Albert knew N’Tschambi would be killed by those from his village. In time, N’Tschambi recovered and could be trusted to do tasks around the hospital during the day, but he was locked in his room at night.
With the dysentery and famine behind him, Albert took a canoe trip on the river to pray and think about things. The dysentery epidemic had made clear to him the necessity for the hospital to be enlarged. It needed a ward in which to quarantine those with infectious diseases, and there was also a desperate need for more housing for the mentally ill. The problem was that no more land was available at the mission school compound at Lambaréné. The hospital was surrounded by water, swamp, and steep hills. And although he knew it would be challenge, Albert became convinced he needed to build a new hospital on a larger, better suited parcel of land.
The site Albert sought for his new hospital needed to be on the river, since there were no roads in the area. Preferably it would be near the Big Island so that supplies could be delivered more easily, and it needed to be a large, flat piece of land where Albert could develop a village around the hospital.
Albert found the land he was looking for a mile and a half upriver from the mission compound. The area was called Adolinanango Bantu, which means “looking out over the people.” It was a flat-topped hill beside the river on the opposite bank from the Catholic mission station on the Big island. Long ago, Albert learned, a large village had stood on the site, and N’Kombe, “the Sun King,” had lived there. During this time the land around the village was cleared and cultivated. After the village was abandoned, the first European trader in the area, a colorful Englishman named Alfred Aloysius Smith, who went by the nickname Trader Horn, built a house and lived on the site. He too cultivated the land and planted many fruit trees, which were rare in that part of Gabon.
As he walked around the land pondering the possibilities, Albert was struck by the enormity of the task before him. Building a new hospital on a new site would require a great deal of money, labor, and materials, all of which were in short supply. Not only that—he knew that if he embarked on the project, he wouldn’t be able to reunite with Hélène and Rhena as planned. Yet he knew in his heart that building a new and bigger hospital was the right thing to do. He would have to wait until the new hospital was complete before returning to Europe. Albert visited the district commissioner and asked to be granted land at the new site to build the hospital. He expected it to be a long, drawn-out negotiation, but much to his surprise, the commissioner immediately agreed to give Albert 172 acres of the land as a concession for the hospital.
Now that he had permission to use the land, Albert sent workers, the friends and family members of patients he was treating, to clear it in preparation for building. He left as many trees as possible in place to provide shade. Soon the workers freed the papaya and mango trees and the oil palms from the vines slowly choking them. These trees were strong and mature, and Albert knew that with care they would provide plenty of fruit for the hospital.
As work began at the new site, Dr. Victor Nessman returned to France to undertake his compulsory military service. He was replaced by Dr. Frédéric Trenz from Strasbourg. Albert continued to alternate between treating patients at the hospital in the morning and supervising the building of the new hospital in the afternoon. Regarding his work at the new site, Albert noted in a letter home,
No great demands are being made on my intellect. I drive in the piles for pile houses, clear the jungle, direct excavations, supervise the lay of floors, try to figure out the best locations for laundry rooms and toilets, hunt for a satisfactory place for rain runoff, pick up crates from the river steamer.
Albert gradually spent more and more of his time supervising the building project. He ordered building materials from Strasbourg, including corrugated iron for roofs and walls. At the same time, many donations, both large and small, came in designated for the new hospital. One large donation came from the staff of a Bible publishing house in Japan. Albert had no idea how they’d heard about his work in the jungle of Gabon, but he was grateful for their sacrifice.
As he worked on construction, Albert received a letter from Hélène, telling him her father had died in Germany. Albert wished he could be there to comfort his wife and honor a man whom he’d greatly admired, but it was not possible.
Building supplies began arriving from France and other places, and soon the buildings were taking shape. By early 1927 some of the structures were finished, and on January 21, patients began being transferred from the old to the new hospital. Albert wrote to his supporters describing the move.
On the evening of the last journey we made, I took the mental patients with me. Their guardians never tired of telling them that in the new hospital they would live in cells with wood floors. In the old cells the floor had been just the damp earth. When I made my tour of the hospital that evening, there resounded from every fire and every mosquito net the greeting “It’s a good hut, Doctor, a very good hut!” So now for the first time since I began to work in Africa fourteen years ago my patients were housed as human beings should be.
Three months later, Lilian Russell arrived at Lambaréné. She was the widow of a well-known youth club movement leader in England and the daughter of an English diplomat to Zanzibar, General Christopher Rigby. She spoke German and French fluently, but as far as Albert was concerned, her main asset was her uncanny ability to get the native people to follow her directions. Albert mapped out a plan for an extensive garden and orchard around the hospital and left the responsibility for making it happen in Lilian’s capable hands. This allowed Albert to complete the building of several additional wards. By mid-1927 the hospital could accommodate two hundred patients along with those who accompanied them.
A church in London, England, sent enough money to build a ward specifically for mental patients. When construction of this building was complete, Albert felt at liberty to book passage on a ship back to Europe, leaving the responsibility for running the hospital in the hands of capable colleagues.
On July 21, 1927, Albert caught a paddle steamer at Lambaréné and headed downriver for Cape Lopez, where he wearily boarded a ship. He had been in Africa for three and a half long years and desperately wanted to see his wife and daughter again.
Chapter 15
The Madness of These Nations
Albert realized he’d been away a long time when he saw the tall girl with long, dark pigtails running down the path toward him. It was his eight-year-old daughter, Rhena. She smiled, showing her new front teeth as Albert enveloped her in a hug. It was good to be in Königsfeld, Germany, with his wife and daughter again. That night, and many nights after, Albert and Hélène sat and talked after dinner in their simple house. They had so much to tell each other and many things to discuss regarding all that needed to be done during Albert’s furlough.
When word got around that Albert Schweitzer was back in Königsfeld, invitations poured in for him to give lectures and concerts. Albert tried to accept as many of these as he could. He hoped they would help his goal of telling people what was happening at the new hospital at Lambaréné so that he could recruit more workers for it and raise funds to keep it all going. Hélène accompanied Albert as much as possible to these events, sometimes serving as his English translator. Albert still found communicating in English challenging. Together they traveled to Holland to give a pipe organ concert for the Dutch queen mother, and to Oxford University in England, where Albert gave a series of lectures on religion. When back in Königsfeld, Albert worked on the new book he was writing.
