Dr. Richard Heinzl spoke with Phi Theta Kappans during the first 2008 Honors Seminar (September 23, 2008) exploring the 2008-2010 Honors Study Topic, “The Paradox of Affluence:  Choices, Challenges, and Consequences.”  He provides us with an example of someone who not only acknowledges the importance of principles like Scholarship, Leadership, Service, and Fellowship — but integrates them in his life.  His life thus exemplifies Honors in Action, pursuing learning to understand what causes health crises and to identify the most serious or urgent needs, serving to heal and help solve problems, and leading others to awareness and in activism. 

While in medical school, he wanted to know more about improving the health of the billion people in the developing world living on less than US$1 per day, and received the support and approval to study abroad in Uganda in the mid-1980s.  While he was there, he had a chance encounter with several physicians working for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, and in his studies and the things he learned from those physicians he discovered his call to serve and the necessity to lead, founding Doctors Without Borders – Canada not long after returning home.  In Uganda and in other places like Iraq in the early 1990s and Cambodia later in the 1990s, Dr. Heinzl learned to understand how even the threat of war creates massive health catastrophes, and even the more humane “surgical strikes” of modern warfare cause economic and health disasters largely ignored by the media and the West in general.  Explaining that for civilians, ”Bombs and bullets don’t kill; microbes do,” Dr. Heinzl detailed the basic chain of events: 

• threat of war or actual bombing of strategic targets such as power plants
• business and professional class who can afford to leave, do
• trade and commerce slow or stop, economic instability results, staples in short supply
• loss of electricity, water treatment, and other strategic infrastructure targets 
• water supply and other basics, like vaccines, spoil
• health care no longer available
• malnutrition and unsanitary conditions contribute to the epidemic spread of disease
• death toll rises rapidly.

The lessons Dr. Heinzl teaches are “borderless” and he urged people in many fields, not just health care, to understand their role in alleviating the humanitarian crises around the world.  Students of business and management can serve and lead to restore trade and commerce, students of the sciences and engineering can serve and lead to repair and build infrastructure, students of technology can serve and lead to open communications and access to information, students of education can serve and lead as teachers, students of writing and journalism can serve and lead by telling the stories of the catastrophes and the stories of the servant leaders seeking to end them.

Learn more about Dr. Heinzl in his memoir Cambodia Calling: A Memoir from the Frontlines of Humanitarian Aid, a coming of age story about his early travels in Africa and Asia. Click here to order a copy of Dr. Heinzl’s memoir, Cambodia Calling. 

Learn more about Doctors Without Borders.

[Monika Byrd, October 2008]

Honors in Action Profiles describe the work of real people who exemplify the Honors in Action approach in their lives, integrating scholarly research and learning with service and leadership and educating others as well as seeking others to work with them. Their lives illustrate the philosophy expressed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 that “Scholarship is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely receives or acquires, but gives.”

Honors in Action Profiles are part of the Honors Program resources provided by Phi Theta Kappa’s Honors Program Committee.  For more information on the Honors Program, contact Susan Edwards, Dean of Academic Affairs and the Honors Program, Monika Byrd, Dean of Leadership Development, or Jennifer Stanford, Dean of Service Learning.