Dr. Jessie Stone
Purchase Native
Fighting Malaria &
Providing Primary Healthcare
in Uganda
Dr. Jessie Stone is the modern day Albert Schweitzer - but who you’ve never heard of! She’s devoted her life to providing primary healthcare, health education, and disease prevention, and lives in a rural malaria-infested region along the Nile River in Uganda more than half of each year. …And then she runs a kayaking camp for disadvantaged children on the Housatonic River in Connecticut each summer, in her ‘spare time’!
…And, at 57, she looks like a younger version of Katherine Hepburn - who famously travelled upriver with Humphrey Bogart in the movie African Queen that was filmed, in part, in Uganda - and she’s got a lot of the glamour and mystique of Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, although she styles more Patagonia than Ralph Lauren.
PHOTO: ELI REICHMAN
Jessie grew up in Purchase - and still makes her mom’s house in Purchase her home base when she’s Stateside. Her father, who owned and operated the Allen Stone Gallery in Manhattan for many years, died in 2006. She went to Montessori, Whitby, Rye Country Day, and then Pomfret to finish high school. Then off to college at U.C. Berkeley, in part to study Philosophy and Political Science, and in part to be able to pursue her love of skiing at the Lake Tahoe ski areas only three hours away. …But a dislocated shoulder from a skiing accident during her freshman year, and surgery to correct the resulting torn ligaments, caused Jessie to turn to kayaking, and redirected her intellectual interest and focus to medicine.
During the summer of her sophomore year, she got a job as a rafting guide on the South Fork of the American River in Coloma, California, at a place called White Water Voyages. She met one of the most advanced kayakers in the world, a man who was a multiple time world champion in freestyle kayaking and an Olympian in Slalom Kayaking, named Eric Jackson, who coached and mentored her and introduced her to river whitewater kayaking on the Rogue River in Oregon. And during the summer of her junior year, Jessie traveled to Africa on Eric’s team to guide rafts on the Zambezi River below Victoria Falls. “I was completely enthralled with paddling, to the point where I was living in an RV just to have immediate access to a river and to go paddling,” Jessie declares. Not the kind of kayaking through gates that’s often shown at the Olympics, Jessie became interested in freestyle white water kayaking, involving speed, form, style, and things like wave and hole surfing. …And in a short period of time, Jessie became one of the top competitive freestyle kayakers in the U.S. She’s been a six-time member of the U.S. Team!
PHOTOS: ELI REICHMAN
After college, Jessie returned to Africa to participate in a kayaking expedition Eric was leading, first on the Zambezi and then on the Nile in Uganda. “We started on the Nile at its source at Lake Victoria. The Nile was then being recognized as one of the top white-water kayaking opportunities in the world - although that’s less of a thing now, since the government of Uganda constructed massive hydroelectric dams in the Aughts which have flattened much of the Nile…and which have anyway failed to provide any benefit that has flowed to the public - but that’s another story,” Jessie draws-in the listener and begins to reveal the scope and detail of her knowledge and understanding of Northeast Africa.
“It was our expedition, and more particularly our journey to the region along the Nile called Busoga land, home of Bujagali Falls, which is about six hours drive from the nearest major airport in Entebbe, that changed my life,” Jessie recalls. “We’d been on the river for about ten days, when Eric got malaria. It started bad…and got worse. He almost died. I was astonished that, despite the absolute prevalence of malaria in the region, the people generally knew very little about the disease and had little in the way of prevention or treatment!”
“Before I’d graduated from Cal, when I was having one of the operations on my shoulder, I met an Orthopedic Surgeon in San Francisco who was, quite coincidentally, named Dr. Stone,” Jessie says recalling this aspect of her story. “He’d encouraged me to go into medicine…and - although it had been too late to go pre-med while I was at Berkeley - when I got back from the Zimbabwe expedition, I kind of put two-and-two together and figured the best way for me to be able to do something like help the people with a total lack of resources in the region of Uganda I’d encountered, or put my life to the service of helping other people with health problems, was that I needed to become a doctor! …I applied to a post-grad pre-med program at the University of Pennsylvania where I worked in a lab for two years, then went on to medical school at New York Medical College in Valhalla, and a residency at the Wave Sport and Jackson Kayak University!”
“In 2003, once I’d become a doctor, I returned to Africa - specifically to the Bujagali Falls region on the banks of the Nile River, about ten miles north of the source of the Nile in Jinja - with the mission to substantially reduce the incidence and impact of malaria in the region. …I met a local woman named Jessica who became my interpreter, and who led an effort to canvas as many locals as we could to assess what percent of the population had experienced malaria and what the societal impact had been. …Malaria, and the very unusual asymptomatic parasitemia, helps perpetuate the disease constantly, showing us how intelligent the malaria parasite is! Without treatment, it is almost always fatal for children under five, and only has a lesser mortality rate amongst adults because surviving past five years old insures that you will have partial immunity to the disease. Nevertheless, untreated falciparum malaria is fatal for all! Having partial immunity buys you time, and falciparum malaria is responsible for 97% of all malaria cases in Uganda. The other species of malaria are present in Uganda, but are much less common and are not fatal. Though falciparum malaria does not remain in the body for life as other malaria species do, drug resistant strains are emerging and causing concerns about the increased lethality of falciparum malaria in Uganda, across Africa, in Southeast Asia, and now across the world,” Jessie describes the disease she’s spent a lifetime fighting.
“I knew I had to be resigned that there was nothing I was going to do about the prevalence of mosquitos, so I set out to do what I could do,” Jessie recounts. “The two most basic things were education and distributing mosquito nets - and the immediate impact was encouraging enough that…well, twenty-one years later I’m still at it! And I absolutely love what I do! …The mayor of the village asked for more, and then the mayor of the next village asked that I apply the program to his village as well, and my work and a reduction in malaria began to ‘spread’. I came back to the United States and raised $25,000, and in 2006 I opened the Soft Power Health clinic in Kyabirwa, Uganda where our operation is centered. The clinic provides primary healthcare, including but by no means limited to treatment for malaria. We treat any illness we can that presents at the clinic, and we refer what we can’t treat. After the clinic opened, we formed a partnership with Mt. Sinai’s Global Health Program, and for the last eighteen years they’ve been supporting the mission with doctors, interns, medical students, and Masters of Public Health students. …To this day, I spend about six months a year in Uganda and return to America for stretches of about three or four months at a time. I’m only one doctor, overseeing over one hundred full-time people working in the organization, and treating over 35,000 patients per year at the clinic. And through our six health education outreach programs, we provide another 15,000 people with health education, prevention, and treatment in the field. In all, over 50,000 Ugandans per year receive education, prevention and treatment from Soft Power Health!”
PHOTO: ELI REICHMAN
“The hard facts, however,” Jessie says soberly, “…are that we receive no funding from the Ugandan government, United States government, or any other governmental or quasi-governmental sources, and subsidized patient fees cover only about 18% of our total costs. …So my job of fundraising is neverending…and any shortfall in annual funding could result in a total shut-down of our operations!”
And as if saving Uganda isn’t enough, when Jessie is home in Purchase in the summer - when temperatures in Uganda, on the Equator, rise regularly in the hundred-plus range - she runs a summer kayaking camp for inner-city kids on the Farmington River outside Hartford and on the Housatonic River in the area below Kent, Connecticut known as Bulls Bridge. She’s been doing it for twenty-five years now. “We take 15 kids at a time, we start in a pool, we teach them all the skills necessary, and we graduate to a series of kayaking voyages, and at the end of the program, each kid gets a graduation certificate and is invited back to kayak with us the following year and any time they can come back. We have had many repeat paddlers, who I hope are converted for life!” Jessie relays.
“With the help of Eric Jackson, Kristine Jackson, Eric’s wife, Emily Jackson, who’s Eric’s daughter, and Nick Troutman, who’s Emily’s husband - we have all been on the US Freestyle Kayaking Team together multiple times - and about a dozen other folks who’ve been valiant volunteers, I run the whole thing on a shoestring budget,” Jessie explains. “It’s all a small community of very special people, and that family grows as each year we add kids who stay in our orbit for years after they’re in camp. My friends, Eric, Kristine, Emily, Nick, and Dane Jackson, who own Jackson Kayak and Apex Watercraft and also donates the kayaks and other equipment, all volunteer. I raise or kick in whatever funding is necessary. A small amount of money goes a long way! The experience has a profound impact on most of the kids and changes some of their lives forever! With some additional donations I could expand the program, and even institutionalize it so that I don’t have to be around to make it happen. But up ‘til now everything about this program has been word-of-mouth, and I don’t have the bandwidth to do much fundraising to expand this program when I have to utilize whatever resources I have to fund the clinic in Uganda.”
PHOTO: ELI REICHMAN
“I’m not complaining in any way,” Jessie states. “As I said before, I absolutely love what I do!” …And she’s so selfless, devoted, and occupied doing what she does that questions about her own life and plans seem to take her by surprise. “I know it’s unusual that my residence is still in my mom’s house, but all I need when I’m in America is a base to do my fundraising, and being close to Manhattan is good for that.”
Not surprisingly, Jessie has been inspired by other people like her, who’ve devoted their lives to the needs of others. “I’ve been moved by Dr. Margaritte Junker, who runs a hospice in Uganda called Rays of Hope, and Dr. Sarah Staedke, who has headed a malaria research program in Kampala for many years. And by Jimmy Carter and Jane Goodall. But I’ve been inspired by a lot of different people. Like Micheala Shiffrin, Lyndsey Vonn, a big wave surfer named Justine Dupont, and Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners In Health. …And I’ve been significantly influenced by Emily Jackson, my mentor’s daughter, who I really admire, and Billy Sarnoff, who was my dad’s best friend, is 96, and still lives right here in Bedford.”
CNN Heroes should give Dr. Jessie Stone their Peabody Award for humanitarian deeds, and the large financial reward that comes with it! Jessie may even be worthy of consideration for a Nobel Prize, and the large financial reward that comes with that! …But until then, the B&NC MAG community should rise to support her good and compassionate works.
