Go Ye Afar: An African Memoir - by Sr Dr Eileen Keane

In her memoir Go Ye Afar, Sr Dr Eileen Keane takes us on a journey of her work as a doctor and as a Missionary Sister of the Holy Rosary in Africa. Leaving Ireland on a cargo ship in 1961, with £5 in her pocket, she describes her experiences, both good and bad, over the following forty-five years working in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. Full of grit and dogged determination, and despite the danger, she provided care to all patients during the Biafran Civil War in Nigeria in 1970 and she came face to face with the apartheid regime in South Africa while undergoing further training there in the late 1970s. Graphically, she outlines the start of the AIDS epidemic in Zambia in the mid-1980s and how the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed. Ultimately, due to the lack of care for patients dying from AIDS, she recounts the story of how she doggedly initiated palliative care in Zambia despite opposition and her establishment of one of the first ecumenical hospices in Africa.