One life at a time

When Daniel Baxter, the medical director of a large community health centre in New York City, accepted an invitation to work in Botswana, he hardly knew where to find the country on a map. Yet he set out nonetheless, naively confident that he would do good by bringing his first-world expertise to help in the roll-out of Africa’s first HIV/AIDS treatment programme. But Baxter’s good intentions were quickly overwhelmed by the reality of AIDS in Africa, his misguided altruism engulfed by the sea of need around him. Lifted up by Botswana’s remarkable and forgiving people and by the country’s majestic beauty, Baxter soldiered on. His memorable encounters with those living with HIV/AIDS – their unfathomable woes assuaged by their oft-repeated declaration ''But God is good!'' – profoundly changed the way he thought about himself and his role as a doctor. Eight years later, when Baxter finally left Africa to return to the United States, he realised he was not so much the giver as the recipient of a great human gift. Compelling, humorous, courageous and often heart-breaking, One Life at a Time documents the extraordinary experiences of a fallible but compassionate doctor working at the front line of HIV/AIDS care in Botswana.

Dr Daniel Baxter is a graduate of Ohio State University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He did his residency at Case Western Reserve Hospital. Baxter is the author of The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor’s Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward (Crown/Harmony, 1997) and currently practises medicine at the Ryan Community Health Center in New York City.