ON weekdays you are almost sure to find Faheem Patel in white tunic, stethoscope dangling from his neck, doing rounds along with other medical students at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Come the weekend though, the medical trappings are shed as he prepares to dive into another world where he finds peace and relaxation; he becomes at one with nature in the depths of the tranquil azure waters around Barbados. On weekends Faheem is the part-time divemaster, a hobby in which he loses himself.
“Basically what keeps me in the water is, it is extremely serene. A lot of people think it is so deep and you never know what’s down there. But it really is the most serene thing you can feel” he explains.“
Just imagine you are under the water, over this reef, there are thousands of fish and creatures, corals, sea fans and plants and you are just drifting with the current admiring these things. It is a weightless experience”
Just two weeks ago he found himself on the edge of danger of such an experience as he dived into the sea on the South Coast to get a close-up look at a humpback whale calf spotted by others on his dive boat. He was the only one courageous enough to grab diving gear and jump into the water, going deep down to observe the young whale. But he had no idea of the danger just under him until he happended to look down.
There was the mother whale, a massive elongated figure quietly hovering just a few feet below him. He was in awe. He was also “very scared” and made it back to the surface, exhilerated by the experience yet disappointed that in his hurry and excitement he had not configured his photographic equipment correctly and therefore had no photographs.
“I would say medicine and diving are both my passions. I am not sure which one will take precedence”, the final year medical student told Easy magazine.
“One of my big dreams is to one day expose to people what we have here. That’s why I am so much into dive photography.
Barbadian-born Faheem went to school at Wesley Hall Boys’ school and Harrison College, leaving the latter in fourth form for Florida where he spent nine years completing high school, gaining associate and bachelor’s degrees.
“In Miami I got to broaden my horizons; I got to see a lot more of different cultures.
“In 2006 I graduated and I had to make a decision about a career. Traditionally I am very technologically oriented. Growing up, people would always say I am going to end up greater than Bill Gates . . .”.
But Faheem considered he had “a higher calling.” That is why he wavered between pursuing a PhD in computer science with the intention of marrying his love for biology and his love for computer science by becoming a doctor.
The latter won out, though he did not get into the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies the first year he applied and came back to Barbados, taking that year off to be with his parents since his two older brothers were living in Orlando. He reapplied to St Augustine the following year, was accepted, and moved to Trinidad where he successfully completed three years of study.
It has been a year since Faheem began his fourth year of study as a medical student at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and he is looking forward to graduating next year and finally embarking on a medical career.
He says: “I have not yet decided on my speciality, although following in my father’s footsteps, family practice seems attractive as well. I like family practice because I am a people-person and I like interacting with people.”
Faheem’s father, a family physician, is Muslim while his mother, a former Roman Catholic, converted to Islam after marriage.
Like his parents, Faheem is also Muslim, but it was not a childhood choice. He said “Growing up, I was not particularly religious. I think it was only after I had moved to Florida that I did my own searching.
“I had gone to religious school here at the Mosque. Yes, you learn the rituals, but it is only after a certain age when you become mature that you really have the time to reflect on what is it I truly believe,” Faheem said.
The experience of living abroad helped to broaden his horizons and on reflection he says, “I guess I was very lucky . . . the opportunity to live abroad, to travel. I got to experience different things. I got to see suffering. . . . I would say now I firmly believe in what I do believe, which is Islam.
“The reason why I eventually settled with Islam, it was the one thing that made the most sense to me. It did not really require a whole lot of blind faith.”
Just after his interview with Easy magazine, Faheem flew off to Canada for his wedding reception being held today in Toronto. It is exactly once year since he married Canadian student Rahila and the two have been apart for the entire year, just occasionally interrupting their studies to see each other.
“It was probably one of the most difficult years in my life, being apart for a whole year since we got married, me being here, she being four or five thousand miles away”.
The couple will be celebrating their first anniversary with a long-awaited honeymoon in Florida.
