Is Lake Chapala the area in the world most likely to harbor a retiree with some astonishing stories to tell?
If so, one of them is surely Cornelia “Connie” Davis, a U.S. medical doctor turned author who came to Ajijic yearning to recount her adventures battling infectious diseases in exotic locales and banking on the village’s reputation as a writer’s colony to help her do it.
Ajijic’s weather was also a plus for this 70-something, who looks far younger. “I’d had enough of hot and humid climates,” after living and working in such countries as India and Ethiopia, she quipped.
Davis relocated here in August 2013, three months after retiring, and by early 2015, her 327-page book debuted as a graceful, “self published” tome, with the aid of CreateSpace and a series of helpers, including Judy King, an early, local editor.
“Searching for Sitala Mata: Eradicating Smallpox in India” contains the tales of Davis’s move as a girl from Chicago to California with her family (of African, American Indian and Scotch-Irish extraction), her sophomore year in Florence, Italy, and, of course, the medical and personal saga of heading a World Health Organization team of epidemiological sleuths and traveling with them around rural India and Bangladesh, where, during the mid-1970s, smallpox still lurked. Sitala Mata is the name of the goddess of smallpox, to whom people would pray, asking her to stay away, Davis said.
“I’d published articles in scientific journals,” Davis explained. “But I wanted to tell this story as if I were sitting around a dinner table talking to friends.”
To do that, she joined a beginners writer’s group in Ajijic. “It was small enough so that everyone had time to read something they were working on, and the comments were encouraging and never brutal.” For Davis, whose memoir contained unusual cultural, linguistic and medical terms, it was also important to make sure she was intelligible to non-medical and non-Indian readers.
Besides its conversational tone, the book is notable for its wealth of detail, especially considering that it covers the period from 1975 to 1977, when Davis, a newly minted physician, was in India. And even the story of how she managed to remember long-ago details (such as the clothing she selected for her job, the state of her accommodations and the content of her smallpox training sessions in India) is almost as adventurous as the book itself.
“Since the time I studied in Italy, which of course was before e-mail and Skype, I would send my mother letters – perhaps one a week – and she saved them. When I visited home, I sometimes looked at the letters. There were hundreds! But after Mom died, I couldn’t find them! I was distraught. Later, I contacted D.A. Henderson, the American director of the WHO Global Smallpox Program in Geneva [mentioned in her first chapter], who orchestrated the eradication of smallpox in the last endemic countries and had written a book about it. Then I thought ‘Maybe I don’t need to write this. It’s been done.’
“But D.A. was very encouraging. He said I should go ahead and write it, because my experience as a black American woman doctor in India was unique. And I was able to get records from Dr. Stan Foster, which helped a lot with details. I made myself a chronological outline and then the memories came flooding back. So, in the end, everything that people read in the memoir happened. If I use both first and last names, that means I’m describing a real person, but if I only use a first name, it’s either because I’m protecting the innocent or the name is fictitious.”
Both Davis’s experiences and India of the 1970s are indeed unique, including her accounts of how she fit in – or didn’t – with India’s caste system and its prevailing attitudes about gender and religion. Classifiedmarriage ads, for example, might specify “a high-caste Brahmin girl, wheatish color, height five feet ten inches.” While Davis’s physical appearance could have led people to think she was Indian, because she was outside the caste system, she was considered untouchable. Socializing with fellow professionals was difficult because, as she wrote her mother, whenever she met someone interesting, her demanding, itinerant schedule left little time for getting to know them. And because of taboos, she was not even supposed to eat with the two men with whom she worked in the field, a Muslim and a Hindu. In addition, simply finding a room – or bathroom – were often insurmountable challenges. These and her other tales of discomfort and risk are riveting for anyone interested in India, medicine or adventure.
Davis’ contact with her former colleagues while she was writing the book highlighted the fact that she found herself in a race with time. She had been a lot younger than most of them and so, 40 years later, some had died. Luckily for her, Anderson was very interested in Davis’s book. When he received a copy, he penned a note that she is including in the second edition (which has also received the 2017 Global E-Book gold medal for inspirational nonfiction).
“The arrival of your book was highly disruptive to my schedule,” Anderson wrote. “I would rate it as one of the very best accounts of ‘life in the field,’ told with humor, compassion, understanding, frustration, elation and satisfaction.” Anderson died late last year at age 87.
After the new edition, with Anderson’s quotation as well as maps, a new cover and more, Davis plans to turn to her next planned book: a harrowing account of adopting her daughter, abandoned on hospital steps in Ethiopia at the age of three months, while Davis was working in that country from 1990 to 1993, during its civil war.
“My daughter wanted me to write that book first, because she loves the story, but it had to wait until I finished the book on India.”
“Searching for Sitala Mata: Eradicating Smallpox in India,” by Cornelia E. Davis MD, MPH. Konjit Publications. Available on Amazon and in a Kindle edition.