I recently attended the funeral of a truly remarkable man. Quiet and humble, Salvador Udagawa was a man of lifelong accomplishment and loved by all who knew him. He was born in 1938 of a Japanese father and a Paraguayan mother in La Colmena, Paraguay — a remote jungle colony far from civilization.
He grew up a barefoot boy attending a mud-walled school with a straw-thatched roof. Bill Miess, of East Amherst, honors a trailblazing doctor. School in the colony ended after fourth grade, at which time Salvador and his family left La Colmena with all of their belongings in two large oxcarts.
They settled near the city of Asunción, where Salvador continued his basic schooling. At the age of 15, he found a job preparing specimen slides in a pathology lab during the day and attended high school at night. His supervising doctor recognized young Salvador’s potential and encouraged him to pursue medical school, using his influence to make that possible.
He did go to medical school, and it was during that time that he met the woman who would eventually become his wife and life-long companion. Salvador received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the National Medical University of Paraguay in 1965. Following an internship, he was assigned to a small rural town as their doctor.
Through the recommendation of a friend and colleague who had emigrated to the U.S., Dr.
Udagawa was offered an internship at Kenmore Mercy Hospital. After learning basic English, he flew to Buffalo, where he quic.