(7 of 10)
Wasolo, where "Doctor Paul" maintained his medical mission, is a sudden clearing on the turn of a jungle road 800 miles northeast of Leopoldville and a million miles from nowhere. In Lingala, the lingua franca of the region, the place is aptly called "The End of the World." The Africans have beaten down the sobi grass around their huts in fear of snakes; beyond rises a wall of impenetrable rain forest. The hospital compound dominates a low hill. The house itself is red brick, and in the rainy season its roof pours drinking water into barrels standing beneath the eaves. In the dry season, Lois Carlson, 36, and her two children, Wayne, 9, and Lynette, 7, would take the truck to a stream half a mile away to fetch water. At the edge of Wasolo is a leper colony whose inmates produce the best cotton in Ubangi Province. They pick the bolls clean with their teeth.
It was here that Carlson chose to make his life. Born in Culver City, Calif., the son of a Swedish-immigrant machinist, he had been raised in an atmosphere of religion: the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, an offshoot of Lutheranism. Two years of service as a seaman in the U.S. Navy (1946-48) provided him with the G.I. bill and eventually his medical degree. At North Park College in Chicago he dated blonde, pert Lois Lindblom, whom he married in 1950. Then came Stanford and a degree in anthropology, followed by George Washington University med school. Lois worked as a nurse during Carlson's medical studies, looked forward to a cozy, housewifely career in California. But then Paul went to the Congo in 1961 for a six-month tour with the Protestant Relief Agency. What he saw there changed, and ultimately ended, his life.
Back in California, Carlson could not forget the urgent medical needs of the Congo. As he told one colleague over lunch: "If you could only see, you wouldn't be able to swallow your sandwich." He remained in private practice nonetheless; he owned a $12,000 home near Redondo Beach, was earning $12,-000 a year. But it palled, and finally he told a radiologist friend: "I'm going back. I can't stand doing hernias and hemorrhoids any more." Some Exotica. Signing on as medical missionaries for $3,230 a year, the Carlsons arrived at Wasolo in October 1963—and were promptly greeted by several cases of hernia and hemorrhoids.
But somehow it was different in an 80-bed hospital serving 100,000 potential patients, particularly since the chief surgeon also had to patch broken tie rods on his truck-cam-ambulance with vines, build cookhouses, make house calls on a motor bike, and still handle at least one major operation a day.