River Blindness: And It Was About Time

Abstract

How I ended up living in the United States was related to my work on filariasis. It appears that my peregrinations around the world had all been somehow dictated by many of the parasites I had encountered! I first met Willy Piessens, who was a Harvard professor working on Brugia malayi, in Chicago at the International Congress of Parasitology in 1978 and we soon became good friends. Willy had invited me to Berghoff, an iconic Chicago establishment, for dinner and we talked about filarial disease over sauerbraten and tankards of hefeweizen. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Willy and his wife Pat, affectionately known as P, had been spending their summers doing field research in Indonesia on Brugia malayi and on a couple of occasions they visited us at our home in KL. When I mentioned on one of their visits that I was due for a sabbatical, Willy invited me to spend it at his laboratory at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. So in the winter of 1984, funded by a WHO grant to work on filariasis, I bundled up my family and we flew into Boston. The generosity and hospitality of Willy and P knew no bounds as they put up my wife Lucy and I, and our two young daughters to stay in their beautiful home filled with fragile antique Javanese batik hanging on the walls and shelves of precious and exquisite Ming porcelain which they had collected while living in Indonesia and in Guizhou Province in China. Our girls Shiamin and Shialing had charmed their way into the hearts of P and Willy, and P soon found an apartment for us in Brookline and even pulled strings to somehow have our girls enrolled at the Edward Devotion School even though school term had already started when we moved there. I was to later discover that President John F. Kennedy had attended that same public school and to this day I am totally astounded by how welcoming and generous the United States is to its immigrants. Our daughters were later to graduate with doctorates from Harvard and Yale on full scholarships and I still cannot imagine any other country that would truly open its doors that wide to people from other countries.