Sidney Kark and H. Jack Geiger, superstars in the realm of social medicine, both got their start at a community health center in a remote, rural area of South Africa called Pholela. In Pholela, starting in 1940, Sidney Kark and his wife Emily developed what would become Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC) with a team of Zulu-speaking nurses and community health workers and alongside area residents. In the 1950s, Geiger went to train in Pholela, bringing what he learned back to the United States. This chapter explores the development of COPC from the perspective of the people who lived in the health center’s catchment, uncovering the important role of Pholela’s residents in the creation of COPC and social medicine more generally. As COPC traveled out of Pholela, the efforts of Pholela’s African women were evident in places like Mississippi, USA, as COPC adapted to new realities and new needs. In focusing on Pholela’s residents and the health center’s Zulu-speaking team, this story of social medicine offers an important corrective to more common stories that focus on the doctors and pushes us to rethink how we understand medicine and who contributes to it.