It's hard to describe aid worker Mike Meegan but easy to be inspired by him, writes Joe Humphreys
Cynics, turn away now. Dr Mike Meegan is not for you. His CV reads like Mother Theresa's, he owns nothing - not even the shirt on his back, and he is spiritual. "Just think of that little old lady going by," he gestures at a woman who passes behind me. "Think of the amount of wisdom that has just gone with her. How often do we open our hearts and try to learn from that wisdom, and have the grace to receive it?" My normal reaction would be to throw my eyes heavenward at such talk. But we're more than an hour into the interview and I'm finding myself nodding my head, like I've grasped some intangible truth about the human condition.
Meegan does this to people. He is quite simply inspirational, and for that reason alone he is exactly someone cynics should be listening to. If that sounds like a contradiction, it won't be the first associated with this scientist-cum-humanitarian who works in some of the remotest parts of Africa treating the most virulent diseases on earth.
For starters, he is a scientist who talks about the divine. He is the head of an aid agency who believes "charity does not work". He risks his own life to help others but says "nothing in Africa really needs changing". He is dismayed at the materialistic outlook of Irish people yet refuses to criticise because "criticism rarely enriches anything". He can't marry, or have a "normal" life, because of the extreme nature of his work, and the risks it entails. Nonetheless, he says, "I have the best job in the world."
Officially, Meegan is field director with a non-governmental organisation based in East Africa called Icross. The title is one used for the benefit of a Western audience. In his own mind, Meegan is principally "a catalyst", working with the leaders of Masai tribes in Kenya to bring about locally-derived and culturally-specific solutions to health problems and poverty.
Low-cost, low-tech, sustainable solutions are his speciality, and many have been written up and published in prestigious scientific journals, such as The Lancet. He proved that storing water in plastic bottles outdoors - thereby using the sun's rays for sterilisation - has a dramatic effect in cutting rates of water-borne disease. A fly trap he invented, using two plastic bottles and urine for "bait", now features in World Health Organisation guidelines for reducing malaria.
Using the trust he had built up with tribal elders, Meegan - who last year won the International Person of the Year Award at the Rehab/ ESB awards in Dublin - also successfully ended a Masai practice in some regions of blessing newborns with cow dung, getting mothers to use water instead. In addition, he chronicled the damage caused to Masai by female circumcision, and persuaded tribal elders to minimise their surgery.
The methodology contrasts sharply with that of other aid agencies, and multinational organisations, of which he is particularly wary. "When you first go to Africa you think 'I am going to change something,' and then you realise there is really nothing that needs changing. Sure, we can create an opportunity where the exterior things - lack of water or food - can change. But what happens with so many efforts at development is that they mess up the tribe, or the social matrix.
"These tribes have survived civil wars, drought, disasters, and they've survived very well. We need to learn from them rather than impose what we think are solutions."
Meegan's embarrassment at being praised for what he does, thus, reflects no false modesty. It is part of a world view that rejects conventional notions of charity. "We need to stop saying 'here is another Irish person making a difference' because it is simply not true."
Born in Liverpool of Irish parents - both special needs teachers - Meegan grew up in the relatively insular world of Terenure, south Dublin. The northside of the city he recalls as "a foreign country". He studied epidemiology and community health at Trinity College, Dublin, and philosophy under the Jesuits at Milltown as part of four years' training for the priesthood. In the end, however, the call of science proved strongest, and in 1979 he took a plane to Africa to put his knowledge of fighting diseases to the test.
Some 25 years on, Meegan now lives among AIDS orphans in the Kenyan bush. He has been through seven famines, six droughts, major conflicts in Rwanda and Somalia, and has received the last rites on five occasions, most recently when he was airlifted from Kenya with a virus that had for a time left him blind and partially-paralysed. Such near-death experiences reaffirmed his view that "how people are cared for and valued during their last months and moments is of real importance."
Don't ask him for dates because he is living on Masai time, in which hours and days are a moveable feast. But one occasion he does recall is July 22nd, 1997, when while holidaying with a friend at Bolton Abbey, Co Kildare, he made a vow to give God his life. "It was a promise to the divine."
It should be said that, while he grew up a Catholic, Meegan's belief system incorporates "Taoism, Shintoism and Zen, the desert fathers and the mystics." And the list doesn't end there. Asked for his favourite reading, he lists a variety of sources from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de St-Exupéry to The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Dante's Inferno, he adds, he would love to read in its original dialect. (Meegan speaks nine languages but Italian isn't one of them.) As an aside, he reveals that the books he has are borrowed - like the T-shirt and jeans he is wearing. He has no possessions, citing as his inspiration Matthew 10, where Jesus told his disciples: "You go into the world with nothing, just the clothes you stand up in, and I will look after you."
Meegan's vow, taken seven years ago on the Feast of Mary Magdalene may sound a bit dramatic. But it was only acknowledging what he had known up to then. "Could I ever be married? I am living with people with very opportunistic infections, tropical viral pneumonia, airborne infections. Every day I am with people with multiple diseases, and most of the year I'm in Africa. Find someone who is able to share that! I want to be home in Ireland, living the same life as my friends. But I refuse to do that as long as other people can't share what I have."
It is a challenging stance, and one which relates to his latest project: a series of books that blend autobiography and spirituality, arguing - among other things - that compassion brings happiness. "Every time I wake up - and I think this is a good indicator - I feel genuinely exhilarated. I feel thrilled to be up. There is so much wonder, so much honour and so much grace around me. It is very hard to get burnt out in a situation like that.
"Where you get burnt out is when you get back to the Western world and you find people jaded, and fed up and tired, and cynical and sceptical. That said, I think it's important to realise that all of us - all of us - are miracles waiting to happen, and miracles don't just happen in Africa."
The second book in the series, All Will Be Well, is published this month. Meegan got his friend, John Hurt, who has lived in Kenya, to write an introduction, although, he admits, the actor had to read it a couple of times "before he figured out what it was about." The book follows no conventional course, drawing on seemingly unconnected stories "which remind us of the power of the human spirit."
While Meegan says all he wants to do is "raise a question" in people's minds, the book has already influenced a lawyer friend of his - who read a draft of it - to volunteer to help Icross.
"In school, we are taught to do our Leaving Cert, and get points for a job, and do a job, which isn'tnatural. We get caught up in stuff, and thereby create things that are entirely fictitious, like stress and worry and anxiety.
"All the stuff that we really wish for, that we don't do, we should do now. And the funny thing is we can. We don't have to get caught up in the details."
There is a passage in his book when Meegan speaks of the long days spent playing with children and long nights talking with "old men of legends and myths" in dialects now almost vanished. He says: "I found that the things we remember about other people are rarely what they say. We recall their energy, their essence, their smell, the taste they leave, their eyes, their expressions and their tone."
So it is with Meegan himself. There is something indescribable about him - the way he smiles when he speaks and frowns when he listens, the bounding energy with which he greets a friend. It is - and I can only speak for myself - an extraordinary experience to encounter someone so living in the present.
"If I died tomorrow I would be very, very happy to go. I have lived many lives in a very short life. In 10 years' time if I could be doing what I am doing now, it would be a miracle. I would love it."
Once we finish talking, Meegan insists on walking me back to my car. I notice after he leaves that has written a dedication inside the cover of the book: "That we find what is essential and rejoice in what is lasting."
All Will Be Well by Michael Meegan is published by Eye Books (£9.99 in UK). Proceeds will go to Icross's AIDS orphans programmes. For donations or further information on Icross (International Community for the Relief of Starvation and Suffering) speak to Rebecca Burrell at 01-6761711, or see www.icross.ie.