If you approach Waynesboro from the east, you descend the mountain on Sunshine Highway (Route 16). As you cross the east branch of Antietam Creek, you crest the slope into the town of Waynesboro. On your left, you are greeted by the green expanse of the Waynesboro Area School District, and within it is a white sculpture of twin doves arranged in the shape of a sloping W.
This intriguing sculpture is the work of a local physician and artist Mohammed Haq. It was dedicated on Jan. 1, 2000, as a symbol of peace.
Dr. Haq explained that the sculpture was a gift of gratitude to a community that had accepted and supported him in a new life in a new country. He came to Waynesboro after serving in a public health hospital in Louisiana and completing his residency in internal medicine in Buffalo, N.Y.
He came to Waynesboro looking for a “warmer place.” He took over Dr. Joe Miller’s practice when Dr. Miller retired and gradually built it and modernized it from note cards to electronic records. His special interest in cardiology included doing EKG stress tests in his office and caring for patients in the Waynesboro Hospital.
Born in a small town, Lalamusa, in Pakistan, Dr. Haq recalled that he enjoyed constructing “rivers and bridges” in the dirt around his home. His father worked for the railroad, and two brothers became engineers. That also seemed to be his future, but his mother encouraged him to consider medicine. He graduated from King Edward Medical University in his native country.
In high school he took a course in technical drawing where he learned he enjoyed drawing, but he had no free time or resources for supplies. Later in life, he found himself drawing on napkins or stray paper. He says, “I don’t call myself an artist, but I like to draw”.
He also attempted to create sculpture beginning with a mother with child but found shaping the heads difficult. He never had any art training, but he was advised to try different things – from chicken wire, he could form, and putty, he could shape. As he contemplated the dove statue, he experimented. “It took me two years’ time.” He has that first statue in his office.
One day he doodled a shape that looked like the sweep of a bird’s wing and noted that with two, he could shape a W. That led to an adventure. He drew it. Then he made it with wood, then in sheet metal. He found a shop that could fabricate some of his ideas. He wanted to create something to express his feelings for the community. He said he chose doves to stand for peace and chose two birds to stand for the native and the newcomer, the old and the new, the familiar and the stranger. The white signifies their peaceful presence together. Their posture, separate but together, speaks to acceptance of differences.
The statue reflects remarkably the feelings of a young man from Pakistan who overcame his anxiety and dared to go to a new country. He earned the acceptance, respect and the appreciation of his patients and community and chose to express his own feelings of gratitude through a gift of meaningful beauty. As you drive by “The Doves” on Main Street (Route 16), you are seeing the success story of a man with a mind for medicine and a heart for art and community.
Article written by: Dr. Greg Lyon-Loftus
