Father Luke's Ark

At a pier near the foot of Market Street in San Diego sits one of the strangest arks since Noah abandoned his on top of Mount Ararat. Once it was a two-deck ferryboat named the Point Loma that carried some 480 passengers on its regular run between San Diego and Coronado. Rendered obsolete by a bridge, the shallow-draft vessel was sold two years ago for $15,000 to a Franciscan missionary named Luke Tupper, who began to install two medical clinics, an operating room, two dental clinics and a pharmacy. He also provided a new name: the Esperanto (Portuguese for hope). This month he officially dedicated the ark, and his main problem now is how to get the U.S. Navy or the Brazilian government or some other secular angel to waft the 55-ton Esperanto to its destination on the Amazon, more than 5,000 miles away.

Those who know Father Luke have no doubt that he will find a way. Now 39, he has spent more than a decade getting this far, and obstacles have not fazed him. He was a doctor before he was a missionary, but while serving in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps on a 1960 scientific mission to Antarctica, he first saw his future during stopovers in Chile and Peru. "I was amazed and appalled at the misery of the poor," he says. "I had never seen anything like it."

The impression stayed with him, but he was not sure how best to help. Two years later, he quit his residency in plastic surgery at a University of Chicago hospital and joined the Franciscans. After he waded through Latin and philosophy courses in the U.S., he was sent to Brazil, armed with a crash course in Portuguese, to finish his theological studies for the priesthood. There he also learned that in order to practice medicine among the Indians of the Amazon he would have to acquire a Brazilian high school certificate and pass written, oral and practical examinations in seven areas of medicine, all in Portuguese. He worked his way through all that in just over a year and was ordained in 1969.

Inspiring him was the spectacle of the Amazon villagers themselves --some 275,000 of them in a Montana-sized stretch of the river basin roughly 600 miles in from the Atlantic coast.

There is no real shortage of food, but much of it goes to feed the roundworms, whipworms and hookworms that live in the bodies of nine out of ten villagers. A newborn baby has only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving its first year. Tuberculosis, polio, whooping cough and measles are all commonplace. So is the sight of children carrying tiny coffins to a graveyard.

There are some 50 Franciscan missionaries in the area, but Father Luke is the only physician among them. In 1970, he began to work "out of two black bags and a motorboat" around Santarem (pop.

60,000) in the state of Para.

But he soon discovered that preventive medicine was the "only realistic" approach. One of his early cases profoundly angered him: a mother with five children lost three of them to whooping cough--"three deaths that could have been prevented by three shots costing 10-c- apiece."

He set out on a far-reaching plan to immunize the entire population of the area. So far, he and his helpers have reached more than 83,000 people and given most of them the full series of immunizations against smallpox, measles, polio, typhoid fever, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. The results are impressive; in immunized villages, newborn babies now have a 95% chance of surviving their first year. To reach many more in isolated villages, as well as to provide more extensive medical services along the river, Father Luke is counting on the Esperanc,a.

His immunization program was at first funded by Oxfam, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, and the Catholic Medical Mission Board, but other donors and volunteers have helped finance the new hospital boat and even worked beside him along the Amazon.

One Franciscan volunteer, Sister Regina Wachowski, 44, is a medical technologist and nurse who has been working with Luke since 1971. He has, he says, more than two full years of pledges from some 120 doctors, dentists and nurses who will pay their own way to work for a month or more on the Esperanc,a--the Brazilian government permitting--once the boat is chugging along the Amazon. The whole operation is now organized as the nonprofit Esperanc,a, Inc., headquartered in Phoenix and directed by a Baptist minister, the Rev. Winthrop Stewart. Also assisting are Father Luke's three brothers and sister--two lawyers, another priest and an engineer. Their mother had the honor of smashing a bottle of Amazon water against the ark at its dedication.

For all his medical labors, Father Luke is no less a priest. He rises at about 5 each morning to say his office, offer Mass, and meditate before the day's work. The two sides of his life are, in fact, totally connected. "If I know that my brother in India or Africa or Latin America does not have the bare necessities of life, and I do not do everything in my power to help him get those necessities," he asks, "how can I call myself a Christian?"

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