Uganda’s first Jewish physician returns home to serve as local doctor

Dr Samson Wamani was head of the Covid ward at a hospital in the capital Kampala before moving back to his hometown to help serve the area’s 2,500 Jews

THE OUTBREAK OF the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020 created serious difficulties for Uganda’s Jews — as well as for the country’s first native-born Jewish doctor, who the 2,500 community members have come to rely on for assistance.

Dr Samson Wamani, 41, was working in the emergency room of a Kampala hospital at the start of the global outbreak. He soon found himself at personal risk when he was appointed director of the hospital’s makeshift COVID-19 treatment unit.

“The hospital didn’t have any [personal protection equipment] and all we were given were three disposable masks a week which we had to wash ourselves in order to keep on reusing them,” recalls Wamani.

An ensuing lockdown also meant that Wamani was cut off from his family and the rest of the Jewish community, who reside in villages surrounding Mbale, a city of roughly 100,000 located 250 km east of Kampala.

Prior to the lockdown, Wamani had regularly commuted from Kampala — where he’d moved after taking his job at the hospital — back to the Mbale area to provide healthcare counselling.

FULL STORY Where there is no doctor, Uganda’s 1st Jewish physician returns home to be one (Times of Israel)

Photo: Dr Samson Wamani (right) serving as mohel, performs a traditional Jewish circumcision (courtesy Wamani)