The Carolyn Arrends song says:

I know a doctor, a fine young physician.
Left his six-figure job for a mission position.
He's healin' the sick in an African clinic.
He works in the dirt and writes home to the cynics.
He says we work through the night so most every day
As we watch the sunrise we can say, Seize the day!

Apparently, the fine young physician lives in Dallas, at least for a few more weeks. Read Jacquielynn Floyd's story here or below about one guy who is really out of the boat.

AIDS-haunted Africa beckons
By JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News
Dr. Mike Tolle is giving up his practice in Richardson to take his family to Lesotho to fight the AIDS pandemic.

RICHARDSON – Mike Tolle is about to start his dream job, but he's giving up an awful lot in return. On Wednesday, he'll quit a lucrative medical practice, leaving the patients who have grown to love him. He and his wife are saying goodbye to family and friends. They're moving out of the Lake Highlands house they cherish, leaving the neighborhood where their year-old son, Sebastian, has just gotten old enough to start making friends.

In barely a month, Dr. Tolle will be living and working at the epicenter of the starkest and saddest reality on the planet: the AIDS epidemic that is destroying southern Africa like an apocalyptic inferno.

"I guess my hobby is medical mission work," he told me when we met in his cramped, book-strewn office. He's not kidding – it's what he does for fun. (In a distinctly un-doctorlike move, he insisted on taking the guest chair while I sat behind his desk, where it was easier to take notes).

Dr. Tolle, a young-looking 37, is a rare hybrid of ambitious idealist and sturdy pragmatist. He has no illusions about the difficulty of loosening the terrible grip AIDS holds on Africa. But he considers it a moral obligation to roll up his sleeves and start trying.

"I don't mean to be too angry, but it's a bit of a disgrace that people are dying of a treatable illness," he said. "Southern Africa is just being crushed."
Dr. Tolle will be one of 50 U.S. physicians in an "international pediatric AIDS corps" being trained and deployed by the Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine (there's more information at www.bayloraids.org).

They'll be the first wave in what the program intends as a succession of medical practitioners who will live in the most AIDS-stricken nations, treating patients and training local medical personnel to manage the disease.

It's a big step, but Dr. Tolle has plenty of experience in hands-on international public medical work. He has been on medical missions to Central America and the Caribbean as well as Africa, sometimes taking along student volunteers from his own alma mater, Dallas' Jesuit High School.

He met his wife, Lorena, while working in El Salvador. Lorena, who was orphaned by that nation's painful civil war, was a driving force behind the little family's decision to relocate to Lesotho (Le-SOO-too), a small nation completely landlocked by the Republic of South Africa.

Dr. Tolle can recall the precise day – the hour, really – when he made the mental jump to the idea of moving permanently to Africa.
"I don't want to say one day can affect the future of your whole life," he said. "But it can."

It was on a previous trip to Zambia, where he was with a small medical group that traveled to the countryside. There, he found a ghost village where the only healthy residents were children or elderly people – all the young adult population was either sick or already dead.

"You had invisible people dying silently in their huts," he said. The children were bewildered, but the teenagers were seething.

"They're angry and frustrated," he said. "They know there's something that can be done about AIDS, and that it's not being done in their country."

The sheer numbers are hard to grasp in the U.S., where comparative wealth and new drug therapies have made AIDS a largely manageable, if chronic disease.
In the hard-hit nations of southern Africa, AIDS is a plague, a pandemic. The disease has reversed life expectancy, rolling it back in several countries to 1950s levels. Depopulation by death has wrecked the traditional rural social structure, which endured for centuries.

Here's what I really admire about Dr. Mike Tolle: He does not lecture or hector. He doesn't deliver any finger-wagging political tirades. But he is one of those rare people who cannot look at a tragedy or an injustice and just shrug and put it out of his head. It's a matter of simple logic to him that if something needs to be done, it makes sense to get to work.

Conscience, idealism, call it what you like. In a dark and troubled world, Dr. Michael Tolle is a calm and steady light.