The cover of “Urgent Calls From Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor’s Notes About Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa,” by Dr. Marc-David Munk. Munk, a part-time resident of Harpswell, serves as medical director for Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue.
Dr. Marc-David Munk likes writing in the air. “For whatever reason, I find myself a little more sentimental,” he said in a recent interview. “I find my writing tends to be more honest than it is on the ground.”
From 2008 to 2012, Munk spent countless hours on small planes providing emergency medical care and evacuation to patients in east Africa. His book, released at the end of January, details 22 of those missions in as many chapters — and he wrote most of it sitting in the back of a plane.
“Urgent Calls from Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor’s Notes About Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa,” is as much travel literature as it is personal narrative. Munk airlifts readers from Kenya, where “it was easy to feel at home”; to the back of a motorcycle in Kampala, Uganda; to the labor camps of crowded Qatar. Along the way, he treats and stabilizes patients for transport — a German aid worker, Australian tourists, a priest in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Munk, a part-time resident of Harpswell who has served as medical director for Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue since 2021, has been motivated his entire career to care for patients in critical condition. A humanities major as an undergraduate in New York, he applied for a post-baccalaureate premed program after he saved a woman’s life while working for a local ambulance service.
After graduating medical school and completing a three-year residency in emergency medicine, followed by a fellowship practicing in Peru, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, Munk accepted his first full-time position as medical director for the Qatari National Ambulance Service in Doha. He then began volunteering for the African Medical and Research Foundation, or AMREF, in 2008.
“I needed to take time away to clear my head and find out what I wanted to do next,” said Munk. He said working in emergency medicine within the American health care system had led to “moral injury,” a symptom of too little time to care for too many patients in “the one place where you can’t close the door.”
“I wanted to ground myself in the essentials of medicine,” he writes in “Urgent Calls.” “I wanted to dispense with the superfluousness of administrators, their monetization of everything decent, and the unreasonable demands of the modern (emergency room). I wanted to work, intimately, with patients.”
Dr. Marc-David Munk was an emergency physician for an air ambulance service in Africa from 2008-2012. (Darren Pellegrino photo)
The Flying Doctors of AMREF was founded in 1957 by Sir Archibald McIndoe, chief surgeon for the British Royal Air Force in World War II, and two of his trainees. It remains the largest international air ambulance service in Africa, providing medical evacuations within the continent and repatriation for patients from other continents.
During his time as a flight surgeon on AMREF planes, Munk flew to 11 countries in east Africa and treated both travelers and locals. He recalls working with colleagues of formidable competence, both medical and cultural: “they knew intimately all the strips in the bush and how to get things done.”
Munk’s book “details my internal wrestling and how I made the decision to return to the U.S. with a fresh drive to improve the system,” he said.
In 2012, Munk earned a master’s degree in health care management. He later worked as chief medical officer for multiple large health care organizations. He plans to end his career in medicine working in palliative and hospice care.
A seasonal resident of Harpswell for more than six years, Munk was drawn to Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue for many of the same reasons that originally brought him so much further afield.
He said an essay by Loren Eiseley called “The Star Thrower” made an impression on him. In it, a narrator walking on a beach sees a man picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea.
“Many of us don’t wield great power to do great things,” says Munk, “but each of us has the power to save one starfish.”
This desire to make the world a better place is an “ethos that permeates Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue,” Munk says. “They’re just showing up, grinding it out, and caring for one person at a time.”
Luna Soley, of Portland, is a freelance journalist and a 2022 graduate of Bowdoin College whose work has appeared in Outside and Backpacker magazines. A former reporter for The Times Record, she grew up on Peaks Island in Casco Bay.
