Doctor Stars in Peace Corps Promo Film

It’s a long way from Ventura to Daga, a rural village in the north African country of Mali.

But for Dr. Javad Mashkuri, the lessons he learned there as a Peace Corps volunteer are just as important as the ones he learned in medical school.

“The people and culture in Mali are so different from anything you’d find in this country, much less Ventura,” said the 32-year-old Mashkuri, a family practice resident at Ventura County Medical Center.

“But living and working with people of another culture gave me a lot of perspective on people, and that definitely helps.”

Mashkuri, who will be the subject of a promotional film for the Peace Corps, recently spent a day with film crews as he made his rounds and visited patients.

The film, to be aired in October, will show Mashkuri as a doctor coupled with film shot more than 10 years ago when he was still a volunteer.

Mashkuri, a Peace Corps volunteer from 1987 to 1989, helped the Daga villagers devise ways to manage their scant water resources more effectively.

Daga is in a band of grassy savannas called the Sahel, which separates the Sahara from the tropical jungles of equatorial Africa. Although it receives more rain than most of the country, water is still a resource more precious than gold.

“Water is life there,” Mashkuri said. “Everything depends on it, and if it doesn’t rain or the wells dry up, it’s a catastrophe.”

Managing Daga’s water supply also prompted Mashkuri to choose medicine as a career because of the resource’s importance to health.

“It got me thinking about becoming a doctor because what I was doing was so important for everyone’s health,” he said.

Mashkuri, who is finishing his third year of residency at VCMC, grew up in the eastern United States and attended medical school in New York.

He would like to someday travel overseas again and use his skills elsewhere.

“My wife and I have talked about it and maybe when we’re finished with everything here we’ll go,” he said. “We’ll just have to see.”