Doctor has deep ties to Cameroon


		MERYL SCHENKER / P-I
	Dr. George Brannen sits in the "sacred corner" of his Woodinville home, surrounded by artifacts from Cameroon, where he and his wife travel each year to treat patients.

Since 1992, he's carried the title of shufai, an honorary lineage head and special adviser to the chief of Cameroon's Nso tribe.

He knows the exotic addendum to a list of research and teaching awards is unexpected.

That's why he likes it.

A urologist and professor at the University of Washington, Brannen, 63, spends eight months of the year treating patients at a hospital in the village of Shisong in the West African nation's Northwest province.

Now, with the UW poised to open a new department of global health, Brannen hopes his unique approach to international medicine, with its emphasis on cultural education, will take hold at the university.

He wants young doctors to learn how to treat people in developing countries without sophisticated diagnostic tests. He wants them to learn that global health requires understanding other cultures, not just healing bodies.

"I want to have a complete, holistic relationship," Brannen said.

Brannen and his wife, Carolyn, have been to Cameroon about half a dozen times since 1991, when they first packed up their middle-school-age sons for a one-year stay in Shisong.

It didn't take the boys long to adjust.

Within a month, their youngest son, Charlie, was talking in his sleep in a dialect of pidgin English used in Cameroon. The boys learned to ride horses bareback, bake bread in an open-air oven and mold bricks from mud.

"They just became part of the community so rapidly," Carolyn Brannen said.

A nurse, she counseled families in the village and surrounding areas about HIV and AIDS and dying. Her husband, who resigned as director of kidney transplants at Virginia Mason to go to Africa, worked at the village hospital.

He, too, learned the unwritten pidgin dialect to communicate with his patients. For example, "Talk your sick now" translates roughly to "Tell me what's bothering you."

Three years later, in 1994, the family returned home.

But home would never have the same meaning.

Their extended stay altered the course of George Brannen's thriving career as a urologist and spawned a connection that compelled them to keep going back to Shisong.

After their initial return, Brannen opened a private urology practice in Kent while his wife mostly stayed home with the boys.

But in 2001, with their children raised, the couple once again felt they were more needed elsewhere.

"I was very, very busy, but not so gratified," Brannen said. "I'd accomplished what I wanted to professionally.

"To advance further wouldn't have had any meaning to me."

He soon joined the UW faculty, a move that gave him the flexibility to spend two-thirds of the year in Cameroon.

Upstairs at the Woodinville home the Brannens now live in part time, half of the family room is all-American, with comfy couches set up around a television. The other half is all-Cameroon. A "sacred corner" with artwork and artifacts from Shisong has, as its centerpiece, a stool like the one Brannen sits on in his official role greeting visitors in Cameroon. From that seat in Shisong, he serves palm wine poured from a carved calabash.

The Brannens chose Shisong because the region is relatively stable and free from war, famine and natural disasters with a bare-bones infrastructure that allows them to put their skills to use.

"There are enough tools so we can make a difference," George Brannen said.

About 400,000 people belong to the Nso tribe in the Northwest province.

Most of the village residents are subsistence farmers. Few go to school for more than three years -- a sad fact in a country where children born to mothers with several years of education are twice as likely to reach the age of 5. The most deadly diseases in the region are tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS.

In Seattle, the Brannens spend much of their time raising money through their church, St. Brendan's, and the Maple Valley Rotary to improve medical facilities in Shisong. They installed a generator and washing machines at the hospital and are building a new health center.

They've also paid for 500 children, mostly AIDS orphans, to attend school.

"I personally think it gets physicians' minds right in terms of what they're really here for," said Dr. Paul Lange, chairman of the UW urology department.

"I think when you go there and treat people who have very little and they're very appreciative -- it just opens their eyes."

About three dozen anthropology and medical students and resident physicians have accompanied Brannen to Shisong. The students rely on outside agencies, including grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for funding.

But Brannen's experience and relationships in the village make the trips possible.

"It's a huge selling point of our program," said Dr. Mia Swartz, a urology resident who spent a month in Shisong in 2004. "We go there and actually are getting to operate and try to practice medicine in this very limited-resource environment." So far, two medical residents, including Swartz, from the UW have gone to Shisong for a month-long rotation. Two more are headed to Cameroon this year.

Swartz said she watched people die of treatable conditions such as bowel obstructions because they didn't have the money to pay upfront for procedures. Women arrived at the hospital with breast cancer so advanced their breast tissue was eroding.

"They come in at the very last stages of their disease," Swartz said. "There's no mammography or MRIs. That's for rich countries."

On a rainy night last month, the Brannens prepared once again to leave for Cameroon. Their 50-hour plane, bus and jeep journey would begin in the morning.

On the floor of the living room, a travel trunk was packed with sutures, gloves, ultrasound machines to measure urine volume, scrubs, medical books, calendars and ballpoint pens.

"We've got this down to an art," said Carolyn Brannen, whose title as the shufai's wife is wibaa.

In addition to deference and respect, the shufai is entitled to four wibaas, but "I assured him that one better be it," she said.

Brannen, who pays his own way to Shisong every year, wants to create a more solid connection between the village and the UW -- something that will outlive his passion.

"They let me go, (but) I would like to see (the university) increase their interest. My goal is to leave a legacy."

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