In the late 1950s, Godwin Onyema was a student at an all-boys boarding school in Nigeria. He had a history teacher whose wife was a missionary doctor from Liverpool, England, and assigned to a hospital several miles from Onyema’s school.
Because the doctor’s husband was a teacher at the school, she came whenever the students fell ill during outbreaks of measles, malaria, chickenpox, stomach flu.
When Onyema (pronounced Un-YEAH-ma) was younger, he wondered why she chose to practice medicine in Nigeria rather than the safe and cozy confines of England. But he thinks about her now when people ask him why a board-certified physician would choose to spend his 40-year medical career working as a gynecologist in small clinics in some of Chicago’s most impoverished and gang-infested neighborhoods.
“They also ask me how many times my car has been broken into,” Onyema said with a laugh. “I say, ‘Never.’ I also say that I’ve taken care of generations of patients: grandmothers, mothers and now their daughters. How satisfying is that? That’s why I’ve worked here.”
But “here” isn’t restricted to just one place. “Here” can be the facility at 85th Street and Ashland Avenue, where the building, which is currently under renovation, has walls that are crumbling and 1950s-type pale green and powder blue examining tables. “Here” can be the humble apartments of teen patients, where he has on occasion been forced to make house calls.
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