Anchorage Daily News

A doctor who has practiced in Bethel off and on for nearly 30 years has been named a Mac-Arthur Fellow.

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Dr. Jill Seaman at the dispensary in Sudan.

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Dr. Jill Seaman, 57, who lately has been dividing her time between Bethel and southern Sudan, is among 24 new MacArthur Fellows announced Tuesday. She received the so-called "Genius Award" for her years of volunteer medical service in the war-torn African nation.

Seaman, a contract family-medicine physician for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., is currently en route to southern Sudan, to Old Fangak, a remote and impoverished village of mud huts, no phones, no electricity, no running water, no anything most Americans take for granted.

The award comes with a $500,000 grant, doled out quarterly in $25,000 checks over five years, from the John D. and Catherine T. Mac-Arthur Foundation. And she can spend it any way she wants.

Grant Fairbanks, a friend of Seaman's in Bethel, has no doubt where that money will go since she "pretty much uses her whole Y-K salary to fund her (African) projects," he said. "Pretty much everything she does is out of her own pocket, with the help of a few friends and benefactors."

Fairbanks, who described Seaman as "humble to a fault," could just imagine her reaction to the news.

"She'd smile and be excited for a while. And then she'll go back to work. She spends her waking hours doing medicine for people or figuring out how to do medicine for people. She's just so committed."

Seaman learned of the award about a week ago, while visiting her brother, Thomas Seaman, at the family home in Moscow, Idaho, on her way out of the country. Until the official announcement on Tuesday, she was sworn to secrecy, her brother said.

And yes, she was excited. But she also wondered, "Why me?"

"She's a self-effacing person. She was raised that way.

"Technically, the grant is given with no strings attached," he said. "Knowing her morals and upbringing, most likely 100 percent of it will be going into building her practice over there, and finding someone to replace her when she feels she's too old to do it anymore."

Seaman received her undergraduate degree at Middlebury College in Vermont, and her medical degree at the University of Washington's School of Medicine in 1979. She started practicing in Bethel a couple of years later.

"I couldn't think of a more deserving person," Dr. Ellen Hodges, YKHC chief of staff, said.

"She's very compassionate, as you may have imagined. She stays late and comes in early and always puts the patient first, which out in rural areas is very important because people have to travel great distances to be seen. She's definitely a role model for younger physicians such as myself as far as her work and commitment to under-served populations. Because the population here is under-served as well.

"I guess we all look to her like a moral compass. She makes us want to be better."

AFRICA IN THE '80S

Seaman did her first stint in Africa in a refugee camp in 1984 during the Ethiopian famine when hundreds of thousands died. There was no turning back after that. To be of better use in that part of the world, she enrolled in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She returned to Sudan in 1989 amid an unfolding civil war and an outbreak of kala-azar, a deadly parasitic disease transmitted by sand fly bites. It killed so many it left some villages virtual ghost towns.

Her work brought her acclaim. She's in the Medical Mission Hall of Fame, and Time magazine named her one of the "Heroes of Medicine" in 1997.

Early on, Seaman worked with Doctors Without Borders, then struck out on her own when the organization left Sudan because of the increasing danger and she was unwilling to, Fairbanks said.

She's a founder of SudanMedicalRelief.org and The Sudan TB Project.

Over the years, the forces working against her have ranged from a maddening lack of supplies to being in a village when it was attacked and burned to the ground.

"She's very brave," her brother said. "If she told even half the stories she told me to our mother, she would have been worried sick. She's been there long enough and has saved enough people's lives that when trouble happens anywhere near, the locals let her know. They look after her. They say, 'You better duck.' "

In 2007, Anchorage doctor Jack Hickel and nurse Lori Gibbons went to Old Fangak to help Seaman, and watched way too many people die of preventable diseases. That trip led to the founding of the Alaska Sudan Medical Project to support her work there. Among other projects, the organization is working to build her a new clinic.

TOUGH CONDITIONS

In the meantime, she's providing medical care out of a ratty abandoned building put up by the British in the 1930s, said Fairbanks, who's helping put a well in the village. Currently there's only one, and people stand in line for hours to get water.

"It has dirt floors and mud and rock walls," he said of Seaman's current clinic. "There are bats flying around the ceiling. When she turns the light out, there are rats inside. She sleeps in a tent right outside."

She does have a latrine. It's the only one in the village, he said.

"It's her only luxury."

Seaman is Alaska's third MacArthur Fellow, a notable rate for a state with such a small population. The first two recipients were Alaska Natives, and both were originally from the Kodiak Island village of Old Harbor, a community of 240.

The first, in 2004, was Katherine Gottlieb, a visionary who went to night school as she worked up from receptionist to president and chief executive officer of Southcentral Foundation, the medical arm of Cook Inlet Region Inc., providing health care services for 40,000 Native Alaskans.

The second, in 2007, was Sven Haakanson, a Harvard graduate, anthropologist and mask carver. His award was for being a "driving force behind the revitalization of indigenous language, culture and customs in an isolated region of North America."

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney or call 257-4465.

Alaska 'Genius' winners

Two other Alaskans have won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship:

2004: Katherine Gottlieb, CEO Southcentral Foundation, award given for her efforts to revolutionize and improve Alaska Native health care. From Old Harbor and Seldovia.

2007: Sven Haakanson, anthropologist, mask maker, photographer, director Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. Award given for his work revitalizing indigenous language, culture and customs "in an isolated region of North America." From Old Harbor.

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