I had the stars of our universe in mind when I first set out to interview the world famed medical missionary and musicologist, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, in his jungle-based leper colony in French-speaking Gabon.

At the time, I was working as a foreign correspondent and journalist in Africa during the 1950s and 60s and needed to meet this man of many parts following his award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Since childhood I had become besotted by a desperate need to understand our heavens at night, our sun during each day and how our world worked. Here suddenly, was an opportunity for me to hear more from the mouth of a scientist who had learned the intricacies of space science from no other expert than Albert Einstein, his close friend and confidant.

As a medical practitioner from Germany, Dr Schweitzer had invested his $33,000 Nobel Prize money to build a leprosarium and bush hospital for the thousands of African tribespeople suffering the intense agonies of the infectious limb-eating problem of being a leper.

He had chosen a site in the tropical Ogoove River to aid the helpless men, women and children who were losing their fingers and toes from a disease which had seriously affected humanity for thousands of years.

When I arrived at Schweitzer’s Lamborene medical settlement, I came face-to-face with a simple do-it-yourself village consisting of basic native huts with scant electric power and lit after dark by myriads of flickering kerosene lamps like glow worms in the night.

Some of the good doctor’s patients were cleaning their painful bodies in the river while others were washing their clothes as a plethora of wild but playful monkeys chattered in the trees against a cacophony of squawking jungle birds.

This village of mercy which I had found also spawned lush vegetable gardens and a tropical fruit orchard and, at first sight, was very obviously a place of reverence for all forms of life, not only for the sick but also for the many jungle creatures so closely intertwined with the lives of Schweitzer’s deformed patients.

On meeting the “Grand Old Man of Lamborene,” who was born in 1875, I found him to be a heavily moustached individual with clear enquiring eyes and a stern dignity hiding a selfless manner of incredible compassion for everything alive. I was also soon quietly advised that the hunting of game for meat and even the killing of the many poisonous African ‘nasties’ found in the local dense rainforests was morally wrong.

During my first night of accommodation under Schweitzer’s simple home roof, I was given an amazing recital of Bach piano and organ music by my host who, as a master organist, was the founder of the international Organ Reform Movement. This one-man concert was held under a flimsy tin roof in the middle of the dripping Lamborene rainforest. Even the buzzing jungle night insects seemed to stop that evening in reverence to this master musician.

When I at one stage invited “Dr. Albert,” (as he was wanted to be known) and asked him about his keen and lifelong interest in the science of the stars and sun, his face lit up as if I was a friend for life.

He immediately explained how he had become a primary source of health over a large slice of Africa by day but had spent his nights studying the heavenly bodies to relax his mind and to understand the many ways their influence affected the lives of everything living and growing. This serious scientific pastime to keep him company after dusk was further heavily influenced by his various meetings and letters from Albert Einstein, the greatest mind of all.

I was thrilled to learn so much more from the brains of the two mighty Alberts. From their writings, I discovered that the sun’s 11-year cycle, creating periods of maximum and minimum solar effect on our planet, was finally a deep reality accepted by World Science after years of disbelief.

My interviewee-turned-serious teacher explained how the solar maximum and minimum periods controlled the incidence of volcanic activity on earth, the appearance of earthquakes, flood and drought, weather changes, the action of all sea currents and the mental and physical health of human beings.

While visiting Lamborene on this particular occasion I also met up with a young American millionairess who had turned her back on her vast fortune to physically work with Schweitzer as a lowly-paid assistant in the leper colony. Her name was Olga Detterding, the daughter of the then head of the Shell Oil Company who, not long later, was responsible for hiding a lady determined to marry a divorced man who her London-based Barclays Bank family objected to. This particular story made headlines around the world when both women undertook a heavily disguised 1,000 kms escape by road and foot which ended in Kenya’s notorious free-loving Happy Valley and a secret socialite wedding. For the sake of marital happiness, they had managed to dodge international police missing person’s hue and cry.

Albert Schweitzer was also the conduit to my meeting up again with an old mentor of mine, a Japanese philosopher and space science authority, Georges Ohsawa, whose lectures I had attended at his Macrobiotics laboratory in Paris when I was younger. Interestingly, I met Ohsawa again sometime later on an invitation from Lamborene, only to hear that Ohsawa had passed away in France after having been poisonously bitten by an unknown insect at the leper colony.

My connection with both Schweitzer and Ohsawa was celebrated in Yamba last year when I wrote, acted and helped make a documentary film highlighting Ohsawa and his philosophies on our heavenly and solar worlds. The documentary was directed by a Japanese filmmaker and a support team from Grafton TAFE’s film faculty.

As a man of balanced philosophical integrity, my one-time tutor was a serious pacifist in Japan at the start of the Second World War, just as Schweitzer did at that time, and was jailed for his opposition to confrontation. At the end of hostilities, George Ohsawa made France his permanent home where he was highly decorated for his many books, including his well-read “Laws of the Universe,” and for previously having introduced a specialised understanding of medical acupuncture to the Western World.

I am told that Georges Ohsawa is remembered to this day at Lamborene for his assistance to “Dr Albert,” Africa’s leading jungle saint and medical pioneer whose simple motto was “reverence for life at all costs with the music of the universe and the stars in your heart.”