The Nuba Mountains of Sudan may not be the place where one would expect to find an Ivy League-educated doctor living among the people, but Dr. Tom Setana wouldn’t want it any other way.
A native of Amsterdam, New York, Catena attended Brown University where he played football and studied engineering.
But Catena, who describes himself as a “lifelong Catholic,” had joined the evangelical Christian group Campus Crusade for Christ and wanted to dedicate his life to missions, which likely meant he had to go into something other than engineering, such as medicine.
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Undaunted by the time and effort required, Catena took the necessary classes to complete the requirements for medical school admission and later graduated from Duke University School of Medicine on a U.S. Navy scholarship.
“In 1999 I completed my duties and all my training,” he told Fox News Digital in a phone interview from the Nuba Mountains.
American-born Dr. Tom Catena is the only doctor in the Sudanese region where he works, sometimes seeing hundreds of patients a day. He’s always on call and is fueled by his deep faith, he told Fox News Digital in an interview. (African Mission Healthcare)
So he thought he would do missionary work in Kenya for a year., Then they return to the U.S., open their own practice, and “get to work.”
After completing his residency and mandatory service in the Navy, Catena finally began working in the mission field.
“If you think Kenya is difficult and challenging, you should see what Sudan is like.”
“One year turned to two which turned to five,” he said, “and now I’ve been in Africa for almost 25 years. The first seven and a half were in Kenya, and then I spent the last 16 here in the mountains of Sudan.”
During his stay in Kenya, Catena met many times with people from Sudan or who had worked in Sudan.
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“They kept saying, ‘If you think Kenya is difficult and challenging, you should see what Sudan is like,'” he said.
Intrigued, Catena decided to change course and go to Sudan. How to get there, however, was another matter.
This photo shows the Catena family: from left, Nassima, Francis, baby Vincent Moses, and Tom. Both children are adopted. (Courtesy of Dr. Tom Catena)
“I didn’t know anything about Sudan,” he said.
“It was a huge country and had a civil war that went on forever.”
Stay in Sudan
While in Kenya, Catena met a U.S. Army doctor named Dede Byrne, who was there to fill in for another doctor who had to leave temporarily. Byrne, now known as Sister Dede Byrne, told Catena that she knew a Catholic bishop who was building a hospital in Sudan.
“I [the bishop’s] “I started meeting with them,” Catena said, and they began planning to set up a hospital and move to Sudan.
During the rainy season, the area is almost completely isolated.
In 2008, Catena moved to Sudan and has remained there ever since: he married Nassima, a nurse, and recently adopted two sons.
Catena said that to say the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan are “remote” is an understatement: It takes nearly a week to get there from the U.S., with the final part of the journey being on foot on dirt roads.
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During the rainy season, the area is almost completely isolated, he said.
The Nuba Mountains “look like Africa 70, 80, even 100 years ago,” he said.
Pictured above is what Dr. Tom Catena calls his home in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, called the “Catena Compound.” (Courtesy of Dr. Tom Catena)
Catena said that while other African countries “have developed significantly over the last 20 or 30 years,” this has not been the case in the Nuba Mountains.
“Africa has always been like this,” he said.
Catena and his family have no running water, no central power source “really,” and nothing on his “small property” requires electricity.
“It’s pretty basic,” he said: There’s no bathroom, shower or flushing toilet.
“We have to deal with everything that comes knocking at our door.”
At Mother of Mercy Hospital in Ghider, Sudan, the only hospital in a region of more than one million people, Catena can see hundreds of patients in a single day. He’s always on call: without him, there’s no one else.
“We have to deal with everything that comes our way,” he said.
The hospital has “limited” exam rooms, x-ray and ultrasound machines and is powered by solar panels and backup generators.
Dr. Tom Catena told Fox News Digital that patients, seen here, come to him with every symptom imaginable. (Courtesy of Dr. Tom Catena)
“We don’t have CT scans or MRIs,” he said, which means patients sometimes have to undergo surgery just to find out what’s going on inside their bodies.
However, he said the lack of modern medical equipment is not the biggest challenge facing doctors.
“It’s so unbelievable.”
Sudan’s education system was fragmented and there were very few trained health workers.
Dr. John Fielder, co-founder of African Mission Healthcare, told Fox News Digital in a video interview from Kenya that Mother of Mercy Hospital had 15 staff members when Catena arrived in 2008. (See the video at the top of this article, and another just below it.)
“Tom cares infinitely about every patient he sees.”
African Mission Healthcare is one of the organizations that supports Mother of Mercy Hospital and similar “mission” hospitals across Africa.
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The organization is helping hospitals with “medicines and supplies, staff training, infrastructure and fundraising,” Fielder said.
On its opening day, Catena Hospital’s staff consisted of “a couple of Catholic nuns, Tom and about a dozen local staff members,” Fielder said.
“no one [other than Catena] None of them had more than an eighth-grade education. None of them had any formal medical training.”
Just 15 years later, in 2024, “we’ll have a staff of 270, over 50 of whom are formally trained as health professionals,” Fielder said. “And it’s really exciting. We have local training schools for students to become physician assistants and midwives.”
“Tom is the most dedicated person I know,” Fielder said. “He cares infinitely about each and every patient that’s in front of him, and he works that way. He works nonstop. He’s an incredibly talented physician.”
Dr Tom Catena says the Nuba Mountains are “close to what Africa was like 70, 80, 100 years ago” and remain largely isolated from the rest of the country. (Courtesy of Dr. Tom Catena)
“He works as much as necessary to provide care to people who are sick and suffering and have nowhere else to go,” Fielder added.
For Catena, a strong faith is what drives everything he does.
“The only thing that’s keeping me here is my faith,” Catena told Fox News Digital. “I mean, if it weren’t for that, I would definitely have left this company a long time ago.”
“I still feel that God is watching over us.”
Catena said his job is extremely difficult and exhausting, and there are “too many tragedies for one person to bear.”
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While the Nuba Mountains are largely isolated from Sudan’s wider civil war, there are still dangers and sporadic fighting, he said, and being the only doctor for so many people means he has to do everything from giving birth to treating war wounds.
Catena said he and hospital staff are “very fortunate” despite the circumstances.
When Dr Tom Catena arrived in the Nuba Mountains in 2008, the newly built hospital had 15 staff members and no trained medical professionals. Today, it has 270 staff members, 50 of whom are formally trained in medicine. (African Mission Healthcare)
“Since I got here in 2008, we’ve had a priest here, so we have mass every day,” he said.
“If we don’t have the opportunity to hear the word of God every day, [and] If I had not received the sacrament every day, I don’t think I would have survived.”
Despite a lifestyle and work environment that would be unthinkable for most people in his profession in the United States, Catena remains committed to his beliefs.
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“God is in control,” he said. “No matter what happens here, I know God is here. God is in control. God is watching over me.”
“This is a wonderful testament to faith, dedication and compassion.”
Catena admits that recently becoming a father “makes me more anxious,” but his faith remains unchanged.
“I still feel that God is watching over us,” he said.
Fielder agreed, calling the work of Catena and his team a masterpiece.
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“If you’ve seen the Pieta in Rome you’ll think this is an amazing work of art. I think what the team has managed to do in the Nuba Mountains, in the midst of war, poverty, locusts and famine, is really carve a beautiful work of art out of stone,” he said.
“And it’s a wonderful testament to faith, dedication and compassion.”
