Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2009

TRADITION
Tagged as a Tar Heel

At first, Ward Blalock ’ 79 was embarrassed when his proud father, Julian Blalock ’ 44, got him a customized Virginia license tag during his freshman year at UNC in 1975. The “UNC 79” tag and the 1975 Plymouth Roadrunner that came with it celebrated Blalock’s return to Chapel Hill for his second semester.

First semester, Blalock was on campus just one day when X-rays during the customary freshman physical showed something amiss. “I had Hodgkin’s disease,” Blalock says. “I had to come home.”

Blalock was treated for the lymphoma and returned to Carolina for his second semester. “My father got me the car and the license tag when I came back to school,” says Blalock, a third-generation UNC graduate. (His grandfather, David, graduated in 1913. There will be a

fourth generation; daughter Nora was recently accepted at UNC.)

Blalock was thrilled at the gift but embarrassed by the license tag, surrounded as he was by thousands of other likely graduates. “I had always wanted to go to Carolina, but I was worried what people would say when I got back down there.”

The tag also advertised his freshman status at a time when freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus. “My grandmother

WARD BLALOCK ’ 79

lived in Hillsborough, and I used Ward Blalock ’ 79 has sported a “UNC 79” license plate on his vehicles since the original plate that celebrated his conquering lymphoma and returning to

to keep the car over there,” he says.
school for his freshman year.
Blalock, now a pediatrician
living in Newport News,Va., never got teased
and never got caught. Despite losing a semes-
ter, he graduated on time with a degree in
chemistry. He’s kept the UNC 79 personalized
license number, although not the original tag,
on four more cars.

The license plate that first represented hope for the future now stands for fond memories. It’s also a conversation starter. “Sometimes I’ll be pulling up to a stoplight and someone will wave and point to my license plate,” he says.

— Karen Haywood Queen ’ 83

MEDICINE
Priceless
Practice

BWANA KERROW HUSSIEN

Mathare, most on less than 50 cents a day.

“The patients are remarkably kind, dignified and resilient,”

When Dr. Richard

Allen Vinroot Jr. ’ 92 enrolled at Carolina, “I was an 18-year-old scoundrel trying to find my place in the world,” he says.

Vinroot says. “I am sure many Westerners could not survive in the environment for a day.”

“This is not where I thought I would be 20

Vinroot brings
years of travel to his
new post — experi-
ence in an emergency
room in Charlotte,
work with a doctor in
rural Robeson County
and, most recently,
expertise earned dur-
ing his emergency medicine residency at
Louisiana State University/Charity Hospital in
New Orleans. He was among the physicians
who stayed on when Hurricane Katrina hit in
2005.

years later, but I have Dr. Richard Allen Vinroot Jr. ’ 92, center, and Kenyan

found my place in the

“askaris” (guards and drivers who work for Doctors

Without Borders), pause for a photo near The Blue

world, and it is a slum

House clinic in the Mathare slums on the outskirts of

in East Africa,” says

Nairobi, Kenya.

Vinroot, who earned his master’s in public health and his medical degree at UNC in 2004. “Tearing down broken, dusty roads in the back of a Land Cruiser ambulance, shouting to my driver in Swahili while trying to place an IV in some dying African’s arm, I often say to myself, ‘Is this really me, and is this really where my life has led me?’ It is surreal at times, like some book I have read or movie I watched.”

Vinroot is working for Doctors Without Borders in the Mathare slums on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. As a tuberculosis field physician, he works in a small emergency room in the clinic known as The Blue House. Between 400,000 and 600,000 people live in

“During Hurricane Katrina, we had to provide care in an environment which was very different from the norm,” he recalls. “At one point, I was forced to place a breathing tube in a woman’s airway without light, electricity, drugs or proper tools for the procedure. It was difficult, but … she flew out in a helicopter the next day, alive. I will always say that this was the point in my life where I became a real doctor. I think about her all of the time.”

Vinroot knew Doctors Without Borders held high standards and offered strong support to its physicians in the field. The application process involved six months of screening. He receives a small stipend, a per diem, housing, transport to and from Kenya, transport in-country, and disability and health insurance. Vinroot loves the job and plans to recruit more physicians to the cause when he returns to New Orleans. “I promise you,”Vinroot says, “any physician would be crazy to come here for the money. But the challenges faced, the experience gained, personal growth and lives changed — you could not put a price on this.”