F E AT U R E : H E A LT H S C I E N C E S
“It landed in my heart”
Dr Craig Parker (MBBCh 2015) left a career in engineering to work in a public hospital and serves in one of the country’s poorest regions in South Africa. Named the Best Rural Doctor of the Year in 2022, he tells us why he finds his job so rewarding. BY JACQUELINE STEENEVELDT
36 W I T S R E V I E W
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uch has been written about midlife and its perils – research suggests even primates undergo a phase of unhappiness in middle age. Dante said, aged 35: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In a dark wood, the right road lost.” In 2011, at the age of 39, Dr Craig Parker walked away from two decades of a lucrative career as a mechanical mining engineer. “I didn’t see the purpose in what I was doing. I was frustrated by the long lag between what you do and the feedback. I just felt I was helping to make rich people richer and there wasn’t much satisfaction in that. It wore me down,” he says in a Zoom interview from his study in Gonubie, a small seaside village about a 15-minute drive from East London, on the sunshine coast of the Eastern Cape. “On the [mining] projects I always tried to build a school or a clinic or something and there was always lots of talk in the beginning, but never seemed to be enough time or money at the end,” he says. “It was a bit heartless.” The shelves beside him are lined with lever arch files and
