“You're eating with your fingers and with such ease,” I exclaimed intrigued when I first met Dr. Cheol Woong Jung at the 3^rd National Convention & Scientific Seminar on Organ Transplantation that was held on 6th & 7th May 2017 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Who would have thought that a Korean would be so at home in Bangladesh! I had assumed that this was his first visit to the country and only as I carried on talking with Dr. Jung did I realize that he had a much a deeper connection to Bangladesh.

Right after he finished his residency, he was given an opportunity to serve as a volunteer doctor through the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) at the Bangladesh-Korea Friendship Hospital in Savar, Bangladesh for two-and-a-half years. He was instrumental in setting up the Operation Theatre there and started performing cholecystectomies and hernia repairs. He admits that while he was fine with the food, the weather in Savar took quite some getting used to! He stayed there till 2005, after which he returned home. His next stop was the US where he spent time as an abdominal transplant surgery fellow in the University Hospital of Cincinnati, Ohio.

The work was so arduous that he lost 20 kg in two months! But the experience was invaluable. After completing the fellowship, he returned to Korea and began working at his alma mater. He is at present Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery of the Korea University and Chief of the Division of Transplantation and Vascular surgery at Korea University Anam Hospital, Seoul.

His invitation to Dhaka for the meeting was because of a serendipitous encounter in Hong Kong. He was there to attend The Transplantation Society meeting in August 2016 when he heard a couple of doctors speaking in “Bangla”! The urge to find out more was irresistible; he went up and said hello, and it turned out that one of the doctors was Dr. Shakid of Kidney Foundation, Bangladesh. The impromptu conversation led to an invitation to the 3rd National Convention & Scientific Seminar on Organ Transplantation.

I learnt that Dr. Jung's interests lay in marginal kidney donors, ischemic-reperfusion injury, and immunosuppressants as well as ABO Incompatible (ABOI) kidney transplants. He said that culturally Koreans were not comfortable with swap transplants and an ABOI kidney transplant was considered the best alternative.

He also spoke about the advances that the deceased organ donation programme in South Korea had made with the organ donation rate going into double digits in 2016 (11 per million population to be precise). This is the highest in Asia and an example worth emulating.

A mobile app has been created to provide an easy and convenient way for anyone to register as an organ donor in Korea. Dr. Jung said that he would now like to share his expertise with the medical community in Bangladesh and train surgeons in the complex field of transplantation...and continue to serve the country just as he had all those years ago in Savar as a volunteer doctor.

Dr. Sumana Navin