GLOBAL HEALTH AT HOME

Ethan Gable, MD ’13, showing Roda Ndayikunda her baby’s heartbeat, both amused to see how much the baby is moving.

HEALTH AT HOME Global

JERICHO ROAD COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER, LED BY TWO ALUMNI

BY MARK SOMMER

than Gable, MD ’13, never expected to work in global health two blocks from where he grew up on Buff alo’s West Side, but that is where his remarkable career path has taken him. At times, it seems like he’s a world away from where he started. Gable, an obstetrician-gynecologist, is chief medical offi cer for Jericho Road Community Health Center, where a signifi cant number of Buff alo’s resettled refugees, asylum seekers and other members of the city’s international population receive health care, as does a large percentage of people who live in the surrounding community. Almost all are low income. E

A WELCOME MESSAGE IN 16 LANGUAGES About 60 percent of the patients who walk through the clinic’s front door speak a language other than English. All are welcomed by a message, written in 16 languages, posted at the check-in area: “Jericho Road Community Health Center serves all patients regardless of ability to pay. Discounts for services are offered, depending on family size and income.”

The languages—Burmese, Spanish, Arabic, Somali and Karen, to name a few—represent just a small sampling of the native tongues spoken by patients, many of whom have left behind brutal governments, chaotic living conditions and squalid refugee camps.

The refugees, about 80 percent of whom are under age 12, are welcome in Buffalo, where they have helped stem a decades-long decline in population due to the loss of manufacturing jobs. In the past 10 years, about 12,571 have resettled in the City of Good Neighbors, an average of more than three people a day, according to the U.S. State Department. Today, this population composes about 60 percent of the patients at Jericho Road Community Health Center.

“I don’t doubt that Jericho Road is making a difference,” Gable says. Nor does he doubt that it has made a difference for him. “The sense of purpose I gain in working with patients here is more motivating than other things we think will make us happy, like money.” WANTED TO DO BETTER Gable is intimately familiar with the neighborhood where Jericho Road resides. He grew up there in a single-parent household, without a car and with his family on and off public assistance. The youngest of six children, and the only boy, he didn’t meet his father until the age of 10. While Gable was growing up, only one sister still lived at home. When he was in the eighth grade, she had a child whom Gable’s mother raised with Gable’s help. The added responsibility led him to think more seriously about his own future.

“We had a lot of negative influences around us, including drug use, and my sister got caught up in them,” Gable recalls. “I wanted to do better and realized in high school that I had to get out of my own negative influences and redefine myself.”

Gable was expected to stay out of trouble, but educational expectations at home were low. On his own initiative, he transferred to an affordable private high school as a junior, using money he earned during the summer and school year to help pay for tuition. The change of scenery rekindled an interest he had long harbored to study medicine, but thought he had no chance of pursuing. “I had to get over a lot of doubt that comes with generational poverty,” Gable says. “I thought being a doctor was a pipe dream, because not many kids from the West Side think seriously of being a physician or a professional.” HELP ALONG THE WAY It helped that Gable had a role model in the founder of Jericho Road Community Health Center, Myron Glick, MD, ’93, who grew up in a traditional Amish Mennonite community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Glick had planned to be a medical missionary, but after finishing medical school at UB and seeing a need to help the local underserved population, he and his wife, Joyce, opened Jericho Road Family Practice in 1997. Glick was the lone physician, and the first week his practice was open, his only patients were a mother and her two children. Gable, age 14 at the time, and his family soon became patients of Glick.

In the 2000s, refugees began streaming into Buffalo’s West Side, fleeing war-torn and poverty- stricken nations, from East and West Africa to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Many if not most found their way to an expanding Jericho Road’s welcoming doorstep.

Glick believes that health care should be a basic human right. “Our whole motivation for being here grows out of our faith and the belief that if Jesus were a doctor now, here, he would be upset by the injustice in the health system, and he would especially reach out to the poor and the most vulnerable,” Glick says. “That is at the heart of why we do what we do.”

That philosophy, and how he saw it practiced at the clinic, resonated with Gable. “When I thought of what it meant to be a physician, I thought of Myron Glick,” he says. “Myron stands up for what’s right. You see his impact— the relationships, the babies named after him. He allows everyone with Medicaid in his private practice despite the lower reimbursement. Myron says ‘Whoever needs care, here I am.’ It is the whole picture of what he stands for that really said to me that this is the right thing to do and I want to learn how to do it.”

Gable attended Buffalo State College and between his first and second years, he volunteered at Jericho Road’s Monday night clinic for new refugees. Initially he was assigned “I thought being a doctor was a pipe dream, because not many kids from the West Side think seriously of being a physician or a professional.” —ETHAN GABLE, MD ’13