Stan Brock is the most famous man you’ve never heard of.
At 5AM, as dawn breaks over another formerly empty warehouse at the desolated outskirts of an US city, Stan flings open the doors to a “crucible of suffering”: America’s unemployed, low-paid workers and unskilled labourers, all victims of a deeply discriminatory and bitterly expensive healthcare system. Some have fresh wounds. Others have been carrying their untreated diagnosis for twenty years. Hundreds of them, queueing in pain and discomfort, gripping a slip of paper inscribed with a few digits, are patiently awaiting relief. Greeting them is Stan, a 79 year old soft-spoken Brit who originally left his home in Preston, Lancashire to wrestle Guyana’s cheetahs and anacondas for millions of TV viewers and now, after a journey of a lifetime, is battling a much fiercer opponent: the injustices of America’s healthcare system.
Stan Brock is the founder of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a charity organisation sustained by an army of volunteers who over the course of 12 years have provided $51.6 million (£30.2m) worth of healthcare to over 260,000 US patients. The life story of this British pioneer who moved on to take a “vow of poverty” and became something described as a “medical monk” is now being documented by Scottish director Paul Michael Angell, 36, in his upcoming feature-film “Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story”.
Paul became acquainted with Stan in 2012, after reading an article in The Times about him the year before. He was immediately blown away by his story and thought it would make an incredible documentary. When he called RAM’s office, Stan picked up the phone himself. The very next day set the stage for an independent project that would span over two years and take Paul on a harrowing and inspiring journey through California, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and Ohio to witness “the knots and bolts of how RAM run their operations and observe Stan in his own environment”.
Paul would spend a month following Stan in his missions, of which he undertook over 700 since his charity started operating in the US in 1992. In June 2012, after 6 months of crowdfunding their project on Kickstarter, Paul arrived at a huge clinic in Sacramento, California, where he met “an unflappable man”.
“I thought he was very accomplished, calm and composed — nothing really fazes him. A man of few words, a man who prefers deeds to words, I would say. But also a man who has some great annecdotes, some great stories about the past.”
Few of his stories would touch on his birthplace, a house on 31 Wickley Road in Preston. Born in 1936, he would soon leave his Lancashire hometown to follow his father, a civil servant for the British government, around various locations throughout the UK and eventually all the way into British Guyana at the age of 17. However, his roots have not been lost on him.
“Stan is so desperately British,” Paul says. What he means by that, he explains, is that Stan “still defines himself by his ‘Britishness’”.
“He has an enormous Union Jack flag on the wall, he still has a British accent even though he hasn't been here since 1952. He cites Winston Churchill as his hero. He believes in the universal principles of the NHS. He is so obviously a product of Britain, it’s incredible. He is one of the last true World War Brits, even though he was only three when the war happened. But everything about that time is instilled in this man.”
Despite that, Stan’s name will fall on deaf ears in the UK, since none of his work has touched British ground so far. But that might change this July, when Stan is visiting London and Bournemouth to enquire into the prospect of running RAM clinics in the UK. Meeting with the Royal College of GPs, the Royal Society of Medicine and international crisis response charity Rescue Global, they will assess the current state of the NHS. His guided tour of a London clinic will be captured on camera by Paul.
The hours of footage recorded so far in RAM’s mobile clinics distil the flaws of a system which let down millions of its citizens in the service industry, marginalised low-skilled workers who make up almost 40% of the country’s economy. They are the people for whom Stan gave up his fame and worldly possessions and whom he greets with a smile at various locations throughout America every two weeks.
Paul watched this unravel before his eyes: “Being at one of these clinics and watching everybody queue up, the overwhelming sensation is like a crucible of suffering. It’s like the whole place is full of suffering. And the moment when those doors open it’s like you realise the whole good work and humanity of people at RAM is powerful enough to negate that suffering. I don’t think I've been anywhere like that before, where bad can be so easily turned into good.”
“That must be the reality of a low-paid American: a constant fear of falling ill and the anxiety of wondering who’s gonna help and what’s gonna happen.”
“It is baffling to me how the world’s wealthiest nation could have got itself into a situation where it can’t provide something which is a basic human right. What is going on? They have so much disposable income, so much wealth and consumption, and yet they are unable to believe in the principle of free universal healthcare.”
Paul, who has been working as a Camera Operator for Channel 4 and ITV and directed several internationally acclaimed documentaries, has received incredible access and insight into both the works of the organisation and the Stan’s humble day to day existence. For him, “being in the moment”, engaging with people and hearing their stories is invaluable.
“I'm still amazed by how few people have refused to be filmed in this project. I think that the fact that we were allied with Stan and RAM, that meant that people trusted us. We got a foot in the door because people respect Stan and they see that we are with them and they trust us. So the power of RAM is powerful to us.”
Watching Stan is similar to witnessing a “modern day Saint Francis of Assisi”, Paul says. His personality incorporates the heart and soul of his charity’s mission: give everything to the people in need. What he keeps is next to nothing: living on a diet of rice, beans, fruit and water, he never carries money. With no income apart from a small stipend from the government, he sleeps on the floor in his office.
When Paul asked Stan why he still lives with nothing even after his organisation grew and received enough funding to sustain itself, his answer was as dedicated as his every other action: to break off from this vow of poverty would be a betrayal of the founding principles of the organisation, and a betrayal of all the people and all the hard work that the volunteers themselves have put in.
Together with Producer Victor Buhler and Executive Producer Wael Kabbani, the filming process, expected to last until January 2015, will take the small crew from RAM’s biggest clinic in New York, to the plains and jungles of Guyana, where Stan spent 15 years surrounded by Amerindian tribes on the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. The documentary, which will be released the following March, will also feature aerial footage shot from a plane flown during the 1944 Normandy Invasion, which was later donated to Stan and RAM.
Paul, currently based in London, is hoping that audiences everywhere will be moved by the story, intrigued by Stan’s personality and “wowed by Stan’s past adventures”. Between contacting broadcasters in the United States, Britain and Europe for solid investment, they are accepting funding from donors excited to see this project come alive.
The blurb of “Medicine Man” promises an answer to the fundamental question: why has Stan chosen to devote his life to bringing decent free health services to the people of America? And what “fuels this 78 year-old Englishman superman with the stamina of a 25 year-old”?
As an insider to Stan’s life story, Paul has an answer:”I think that Stan derives happiness from the activities of RAM. It’s rare for somebody to be so sensitive to the suffering of other people, to feel that suffering with such genuine compassion”.
“He feels other peoples’ pain deeper than the rest of us do and he’s moved to do something about it. I simply think that happiness is defined as easily as that for Stan. Their dream is to expand across America and help everybody who needs it.”
“Medicine Man: The Stan Brock story” official website: www.medicinemanstanbrock.com
This story was published in the Lancashire Evening Post www.lep.co.uk
