Dr. Stephen Carryl – Providing free medical assistance to Linden for 27 years

Jul 22, 2018 News

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By Enid Joaquin

Stephen Carryl’s story is a unique one. It brings out a whole gamut of emotions – it can make you smile and cry, then almost simultaneously, evoke joy and laughter in your heart.

Carmen Carryl’s little boy, who in 1964 was barely two when the Son Chapman launch exploded with her on board, has grown into quite a man!

Carmen would have been one of the proudest of mothers if she had lived to see her baby grow….

July 6th marked the fifty-fourth anniversary of the tragedy that denied Stephen the luxury of growing up under his mother’s care. Such situations have been known to breed hate and a general distrust of people by those who have suffered. But not this one…

Stephen Carryl has matured into one of the most benevolent of persons, having committed himself to voluntarily making life a little better for his fellow Lindeners.

On July 10, last, he wrapped up his 27th medical mission to Linden, with the Overseas Medical Assistance Team (OMAT).

Dr Stephen Carryl is the General Surgeon with OMAT. But that’s not the most interesting part. The most exceptional thing about the mission is that Dr Carryl has been travelling back and forth between the United States and Guyana over the past twenty years, with his entire household – wife Joanne, his mother-in-law and two daughters.

When he started this incredible journey back in July 1997, his eldest daughter Samella was just three months old. Today she is twenty-two, and walking in daddy’s footsteps, having already enrolled in medical school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me take you back…

After Carmen Carryl’s death, close female relatives stepped in to take care of her children, including Stephen, who was the youngest.

Stephen reflects that it is the family’s extended church family, that was its greatest consolidating force.

Stephen Samuel Carryl was born at 433 Greenheart Street, Linden, where the family lived in one of the range houses built by the bauxite company for employees. The family subsequently moved to Mora Street and Harder Road where Stephen grew up.

He attended the Seventh-day Adventist School, then St Aidans, both on Burnham Drive, Wismar, Linden.

After successfully writing the Common Entrance Examination, Stephen was enrolled at Kara Kara High School (Preston High) which later became the Christianburg Wismar Secondary School (Multi).

At the tender age of seventeen, he left Guyana for College in Trinidad.

Stephen admits that he had to work his way through college to support himself and elder sister Dawn, who was also attending college and working in the cafeteria there, as there was no way his family could support them.

“While in College, I had to find a way to support us, so I got into the Housekeeping Department, where I used to clean the classrooms in the evenings, and on the weekends, I used to work on a farm. It was a three hundred-acre abandoned farm of citrus and cocoa that needed workers to clear it…It was dangerous work, as the farm was infested with poisonous snakes,” he said.

Stephen’s job was to clear the farm of weeds. This he did for two years, after which he got into construction work. He also cut the lawns for a Trinidadian, which was another way that he made money to help pay the bills.

He subsequently left Trinidad in 1981 for the United States, where he arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. By that Friday, he had already started working.

“My elder brother who was already over there had gotten a job for me, which was part time. My goal was now to raise money so that I could go to College and finish my education.

He started College in Alabama shortly after and finished there in three years.

Following College, Stephen enrolled in Medical School in California, then later went back to New York for his training in surgery, which took five years, then practised there.

He later served in three hospitals as the Director of Surgery – one of them the Caledonian Hospital – and then became the Chairman of surgery of the Brooklyn Hospital, one of the oldest hospitals in New York.

Dr. Carryl is currently the Chairman of surgery of the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn.

The interesting thing is that medicine was not Stephen Carryl’s first career choice. He had started out in Trinidad studying theology to qualify himself to become a pastor. He however switched because of what was available at the College, which only had one bachelor’s degree and a few associate degree programmes.

He completed medical school in 1984.

“At medical school, you don’t have to commit to any area immediately, but when I started doing the different rotations and getting the exposure in different areas in medicine, that is when I realized I really enjoyed the surgical part. I would leave theatre at the end of the day excited…I didn’t feel tired, or drained, I was enjoying myself – that is how I knew I had found my niche.”

Dr Carryl finished his residency twenty-five years ago and has been in private practice as a surgeon ever since. He started his medical missions to Guyana upon encouragement from his father.

At the time, he had only completed four years of the five-year stipulated surgery training.

“I started coming back here even before I graduated from my residency, because I recognised then that I was more trained than any surgeon in Guyana at the time.”

OMAT

Dr. Carryl is the founder and President of the Overseas Medical Assistance Team (OMAT), which he established. OMAT did its first medical mission to the Mackenzie Hospital in July 1991 with a nine-member team. Dr. Carryl said that OMAT was started with mainly Guyanese, but included medical professionals from other countries.

Among the Guyanese who came with the team on the first mission was Dr. Joseph Haynes, who had returned home for the first time after many years overseas. Haynes subsequently relocated to Guyana.

The OMAT travels to many countries paying their own way and offering medical services for free.

Dr. Carryl said that he and his wife Joanna are the biggest donors to OMAT, but the organization also receives other donations, which assist in their medical missions. During the most recent mission to the Linden Hospital Complex, apart from rendering the usual medical interventions in surgery, dentistry, psychology and other areas, OMAT donated US$10,000 in medical supplies to the institution.

They also donated US$5,000 to the Linden Special Needs School.

As usual, Dr. Carryl was accompanied on the mission by his wife Joanne, a social worker, his mother-in-law Rosemarie Williams, his two daughters, Samella and Leigha, and other members of OMAT.

According to his wife, God has been the bedrock of the family, and Stephen, of course, considers it a privilege and blessing to be used by the Almighty to assist those in his community as well as further afield.

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