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Abstract
This article presents the story of a young brain surgeon who goes to the African bush on vacation and leaves with a new mission. Dilan Ellegala was born in Sri Lanka but moved with his family to South Dakota when he was five. He did his neurosurgeon residency at the University of Virginia, and in late 2005 capped 14 years of medical training with a grueling vascular neurosurgery fellowship at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. He followed a girlfriend at the time to Haydom, Tanzania, where she planned to volunteer in the village's hospital. He was overwhelmed by what he saw in the village's hospital. Many patients had hydrocephalus, brain tumors and traumatic brain injuries and were likely to die without surgery. When Ellegala returned to the US later in 2006, he formed a not-for-profit organization to train Tanzanian doctors and medical clinicians to do basic brain surgery, eventually naming it Madaktari Africa, plural in Swahili for doctor.