A family physician living in the El Paso countryside had a long journey to get here, but has learned a lot through his research in Kenya, time as a Duke student-athlete and establishing a family.

From helping create a community center in Kenya to bringing National Geographic in to feature an endangered language called Suba, Chas Salmen has truly seen it all, and it all started in the small town of Glenwood Springs, Colo. Salmen was recruited to compete in track and field at Duke University where he became interested in medical anthropology while becoming a captain for both the track and cross country squads.

He began volunteering with an organization in Kenya, doing community education on HIV awareness and treatment. In 2007, a treatment was becoming available, which came with some skepticism from people in the area.

“It was really this life-saving treatment, but there was a lot of stigma, and people were really afraid to get tested for HIV,” Salmen said.

Salmen worked to promote testing and treatment in the area before receiving a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, allowing him to study at Oxford University in England in the medical anthropology program. Salmen’s ties to Kenya never stopped, with the scholarship providing further opportunities to research.

“I actually ended up spending two years doing field work in western Kenya, trying to understand the HIV epidemic really from kind of a cultural and economic and ecological standpoint, not just a medical standpoint,” Salmen said.

Salmen planned a backpacking trip with his friend to go from the community he was working at in Kenya all the way down to South Africa. The two made it to a bus stop to head to South Africa to complete their trip when a farmer convinced the duo to check out a farm on an island in the middle of Lake Victoria.

“We ended up never making it to South Africa,” Salmen said. “We spent the rest of this trip kind of out on this island, which is a really remarkable community, very remote community out in the middle of what is the largest freshwater lake in Africa, the second largest freshwater lake in the world.”

That island, Mfangano Island, eventually became a place Salmen considers a second home. Through communicating with the people and building relationships, his research continued to progress.

With about 30% of the population being infected with HIV when Salmen started, he helped find links between the massive Lake Victoria fishing industry and the epidemic. An article put out by the University of Minnesota on Salmen’s findings stated people are more likely to use sustainable and safe fishing practices when the population is healthier, and when they are not as healthy, processes like large nets snatching high quantities of fish with no regard for species were used. Salmen said it was not some complicated scientific model that helped make these breakthroughs, rather getting the perspective of the people who have lived in the area for a long time and exploring the culture. With hundreds of thousands of people fishing on Lake Victoria, their practices affect the entire nearby communities, not just the fishers themselves.

On the island, Chas met his now wife Jenna, who was staying with her sister who was studying abroad. The two were staying at Lake Victoria through a program that exchanges farm labor for a free night’s stay. Jenna was from Ellsworth, and when she and her sister connected with Chas, they swiftly became friends.

“That decision to go visit this community on a whim at a bus stop ended up really changing my career and changing the trajectory of my life to be honest,” Salmen said. “I really fell in love with this community, and that’s where I ended up spending the rest of my research.”

After living on the island, communicating with the people and researching, Salmen was asked to help fundraise for a community center on the island.

“What sounded like a very easy project to help fundraise for a community center turned really into like a five-year project and a 10-year project, and we’ve been operating this community center on Mfangano ever since,” Salmen said.

This center has been the base of Salmen’s research since 2009, and he has frequently returned to the island to visit with family. Salmen and his family, which now features two kids, Sunny and Moses, made a trip to the island as recently as January. Salmen said this is the first time they made the trip where the children will be old enough to remember it.

Some of the community’s elders speak an endangered language called Suba. Salmen helped rope National Geographic in to work with the Suba council of elders, a radio station and a Kenyan University to trace the oral history of the language from present day Uganda to present day Kenya. The collaboration resulted in a radio documentary series featuring the language.

“That’s one of the projects that felt most impactful to me,” Salmen said. “To help this community protect and preserve that oral history which, kind of like in our own community, as our elders pass on, their stories and their history, we lose it forever.”

With the generations of native speakers of the Suba language fading away and the younger generations not being native speakers of the language, Salmen said it was important to not allow the history of the language to fade away like many others have.

“When I started this work almost 20 years ago, I felt like a lot of what I was doing was trying to bring education, bring knowledge, bring awareness, bring things from the United States to help support this community,” Salmen said. “I think what I’ve learned over the years is that I’ve absolutely benefited a great deal from learning things from them, and in fact today I really feel like we have so much to learn from a community like Mfangano Island.”

As a small, rural farming and fishing community, Salmen said Mfangano Island shares a lot of similarities to the communities he has lived in both in Colorado and Wisconsin.

“Even though I think it’s a very different part of the world, there’s no running water, very limited electricity, they speak a different language, it looks totally different, in some ways it just really felt like a small town,” Salmen said

One thing Salmen has taken from the culture is how it is oriented around family.

“People there really enjoy getting to know our large extended family the way they have large extended families,” Salmen said.

Children are brought everywhere with families and are given responsibilities people in the United States could not imagine giving. An example Salmen gave was 10-year-olds and even 5-year-olds being tasked with looking after a family’s herd of cows.

“Which is like someone here putting their entire stock portfolio in the hands of their 10-year-old, because that’s that family’s entire investment,” Salmen said. “I’ve learned a lot as a parent from working there.”

Salmen mentioned they have political differences, land disputes and many other issues that also face the United States, but he admires the way the entire community will show up for funerals, back the schools and invest in the kids.

Salmen works as a family physician and as faculty in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota.f