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Sun Oct 19 13:18:10 BST 2008

Sharing Their Stories
By JACQUELINE MROZ

Plainfield

WHEN he was growing up on the streets of Newark with both of his parents
addicted to drugs and his father in jail, going to college wasn't really on
the horizon for Rameck Hunt. He was going to be lucky if he finished high
school.

But Rameck had something that the other kids in his neighborhood didn't
have: two friends with whom he would form an unbreakable bond. Together they
made a pact to support each other with dreams that in other neighborhoods
might seem ordinary, but that in their hardscrabble world seemed improbable.
They would not only finish high school but go on to college - and even
medical school.

Nearly two decades later, Rameck Hunt is an internist at University Medical
Center at Princeton and an assistant professor of medicine at Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick. His good friend, Sampson Davis, is
an emergency room doctor at three different hospitals, including St.
Michael's Medical Center in Newark. And George Jenkins is a dentist and an
assistant professor at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine.

They are the first ones in their families to go to college, let alone
medical school.

After becoming doctors, the three men chronicled their story in the
best-selling book "The Pact," and appeared on "Today" and "The Oprah Winfrey
Show." This month, their latest book, "The Bond," will be released in
paperback. They have also started the Three Doctors Foundation to help
mentor disadvantaged children and offer them positive examples. And they
have been touring the country, talking to young people about the power of
education, friendship and determination.

At a recent mentoring day held in Plainfield, sponsored by their foundation,
the three doctors were among 175 volunteers who showed up to talk to
children from disadvantaged backgrounds about career choices. The
opportunity to speak to accomplished people who come from a similar
background was one the three doctors said they never had themselves when
they were growing up.

"I'm living proof that you can do it," Dr. Jenkins told seven boys from
Trenton who came to the mentoring day. "You really need some good people
around you to help you stay out of trouble and stay in school."

The boys, fifth graders who have made their own pact to help each other,
listened intently to the doctors, then asked for autographs.

"You guys have to work really hard to help each other," Dr. Jenkins told
them. "If you see one of the guys struggling or misbehaving, you have to try
your best to keep them from getting caught up in peer pressure and doing bad
stuff."

The doctors, who are all 35 years old, have a following across the country
now.

"As I read your book, I cried like a baby," Linda Adams, a first-grade
teacher from Georgia, wrote to them recently, adding that she is working to
distribute copies of the doctors' books to disadvantaged children. "The
books have motivated me to keep plugging (your message) because I believe it
will save children's lives."

The three men came of age in a city where high crime, drugs and poverty were
everyday realities. Newark in the 1980s was at the height of the crack
epidemic, and carjacking was a favorite pastime for young people. The men
recall being robbed on their way to school.

"There were no doctors or lawyers walking the streets of our communities,"
the doctors recount in "The Pact." "Where we lived, hustlers reigned, and it
was easy to follow their example."

Two of the doctors were sent to juvenile detention centers before they were
18. All three were raised without fathers around.

"The three of us grew up in a world where it seemed normal for men to
abandon their children," they write in "The Bond."

Dr. Hunt, who now lives in Princeton, said in an interview that he used to
visit his father in jail so often, he thought that was his father's home.

"When I was a little boy, I used to pray and say, 'God, please get one of my
parents off drugs,' " Dr. Hunt said. "I thought it was selfish to ask for
both of them to get off drugs."

School is where their story began. They met at University High School in
Newark, a public magnet school for the humanities. They did well in school,
especially in science and math, but they liked to have fun, too.

One day during their junior year, a Seton Hall University recruiter visited
their school to talk about a program that groomed underprivileged students
for medical careers. After the seminar, Rameck and George were really
excited, Dr. Davis said.

"They said, 'Let's do this! Let's become doctors,' " he recalled. "I said,
'Do you really want to do that? How long does it take?' "

But his friends persuaded him, and that day, the three made a pact: One day,
they would all become doctors.

"It wasn't a blood oath or anything," Dr. Davis said. "We just looked each
other in the eyes and said: 'We're going to do this. We don't know how, but
we're going to do this.' "

They were 17. None of them had ever set foot on a college campus, and they
knew nothing about college applications, tuition or dorm rooms.

Still, in 1991, each was accepted to Seton Hall.

"When I told my neighborhood friends that I was going to college, they
laughed and looked at me like it was something that couldn't be done," said
Dr. Davis, who now lives in South Orange. "I felt it was important to do it
for myself and my community, to show that it was something that was
possible."

For the next few years the three friends lived together, helping each other
meet the challenges of college.

"It was great to go to school together," Dr. Hunt said. "That was what we
needed to get through. It's not like we had the support from home or a whole
lot of mentors. We leaned on each other."

They learned together how to shave, how to drive and how to treat women. "We
even had to teach George how to tie a tie," Dr. Hunt said. "No one had ever
taught him that before."

"Having grown up in Newark and knowing their family situations, I think that
what they've done is just remarkable," said Representative Donald M. Payne
of Newark, who has known the three men since they graduated from Seton Hall.
"It's so difficult for young boys in Newark to make it."

When they decided to tell their story in "The Pact: Three Young Men Make a
Promise and Fulfill a Dream" (Riverhead, 2002), the doctors were concerned
that the response from their patients and peers would be negative. They
wondered: Would someone want a doctor who had spent time in juvenile
detention for beating someone up?

"We felt that we had to take the risk and tell people what we had to deal
with to get where we are today," said Dr. Jenkins, now an Orange resident.

In "The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their
Fathers," the men explore, from their personal experiences, what growing up
without fathers at home meant to them.

But they take their stories a step further: Two of them give their fathers
an opportunity in the book to present their own accounts of why they made
the decisions they did. (Dr. Davis, whose father was unable to do so because
of illness, researched his father's life and told his tale.) The fathers'
sections are unvarnished, sometimes painful views of why men let down their
families.

"I can't deny that I haven't been the most attentive and affectionate of
fathers," writes George Jenkins Sr., whose wife left him, taking their
children with her, because he drank too much. "It's not something I'm proud
of. However, I didn't have much of a road map to follow."

His son writes in the next chapter: "When there's a wall in the middle of a
relationship, you know only what's happening on your side of it. Finding out
my father's life story really opened my eyes."

The authors say they decided to explore the issue of families lacking father
figures because it seems to be so central in the formation of many youths
from struggling backgrounds.

The doctors started their foundation in Newark while completing their
residencies. Their focus was to help young people overcome the obstacles
that had made life extra challenging for them.

They set up mentoring programs and organized events to promote family
health. Next year, they plan to offer a four-year college scholarship to a
promising Newark student.

"We hear from teachers and students and mothers and fathers all over the
country, talking about how our story and books have changed their lives and
the lives of their kids. People really pour out their hearts and souls to
us," Dr. Hunt said.

"What we do is really hard - especially running a foundation while being
full-time doctors," he said. "But we have inspired so many people. And that
really keeps us going."

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