Excerpt.
They were exciting times for the young doctor who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, went to medical school at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and was advised to go to North America to practise because there were better opportunities.
He did a general medicine internship at The Wellesley Hospital in Toronto and was a junior medical resident at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Juma had intended to specialize in an area of medicine and he decided what field that would be at Sunnybrook. He received word his father had died of a heart attack when he was only 54 years old. The loss helped Juma decide to specialize in cardiology.
He became a cardiology fellow at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital and later a research fellow at the University of Miami Medical School. But Juma’s heart was in clinical practice and he wanted to teach. His mother was a teacher and so were several of her siblings.
Juma talked about his spiritual beliefs when recalling his 32 years of medical practice in Sudbury. He is closing his Sudbury office at the end of this month and moving to Thornhill. He will run a small practice in neighbouring Richmond Hill and some of his Sudbury patients intend to follow him there.
[…] Juma believes teaching can only make a person better at what they do. “You can’t teach if you can’t understand what it is that you’re doing.”
At 69, Juma looks a decade younger. He has no intention of retiring and is moving to Thornhill to be close to his daughter and her family.
He still starts his days, as he has most of his life, at 4 a.m., praying for 30-45 minutes — “just quiet reflection, contemplation, meditation, thinking spiritual.”
He is one of about a dozen Ismaili families in Sudbury, a sect of the Shia branch of Islam. The Ismaili spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, whom Juma says is the 49th direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. A picture of the spiritual leader sits on a credenza in his office.
Juma believes if there is something in life you want and are passionate about it, “you become it and it becomes you. But going beyond that, it’s almost as if the heavens are coming together to conspire to make it happen for you.”
Read at the source: Carol Mulligan, April 26, 2016, Sudbury Star
Related
Ismailimail 