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Medical missionary who designed, built, and ran a hospital in Burundi
After a surgical house job at St Thomas's, Kenneth Buxton followed up a longstanding commitment to work as a medical missionary and went to start a medical school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, the Italian invasion meant that-together with his wife and 6 month old son-he was evacuated to Aden and returned to England, along with the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie.
He went back to Africa to work in Burundi with the Ruanda Mission in 1938. Undaunted by having only a bare, isolated hillside-without running water or electricity-he designed, built, and organised a hospital, training young Africans as nurses and dressers. The hospital, which remains to this day, was built of bricks and tiles made of clay from the valley a mile away using...