INDEXING TITLE: JPINGUL’S Medical Anecdotal Report [5-01]

 TITLE: Winds of Change, Tides of Change

 PERIOD OF MEDICAL OBSERVATION: January 20, 2005

 NARRATION:

 I was on duty at the ER, when I received a text message from a friend that a medical team was needed to go to Indonesia, in a place I never heard before, all expenses paid.  At first, I did not take it seriously, taking to mind that the number of residents was down, and my leave was not to take effect until April.  So I asked when it will happen. Then I showed the text message to my co-resident on duty, who also did not take it seriously.

 There was a long pause, and I waited, and eventually the message was forgotten and buried among the many tasks during the tour of duty.  Then the next day, I received another text message, saying that it would take 7 days, starting January 8 to January 14, we would be taken to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, an area devastated by the tsunami.

 Sensing the seriousness of the tone, and the specificity of the tasks, a looked up the term Banda Aceh in the internet, the page where it links to tourist spots cannot be displayed.  A lot of articles talked about it among the foreign news web pages.  Some even showed before and after satellite shots of the area.  It was devastated.  The stories was amazing and at the same time - disheartening.  It was at this time that I decided to ask the opinion of my other co-residents.  Some encouraged me to ask for permission since it had a humanitarian purpose, some discouraged me.

 To make the story short, I took off for Banda, Aceh.  When I got there, I realized, it was no vacation.  The basic necessities were gone.  Electricity, water supply, transportation, and communication were all destroyed.  Food and bottled water was abundant because of the supplies coming in from relief goods.

 INSIGHTS: (discovery, stimulus, REINFORCEMENT), (physical, PSYCHOSOCIAL, ethical)

 As a surgeon sent to a place where one has apparently ran out of choices, one can’t choose what to watch on TV, since there is no power supply.  One can’t choose what to eat, since the only food available was noodles and sardines.  One can’t choose when to take a bath, since there is no water.  The deep well water available was contaminated with the smell of dead bodies.

 As a surgeon, all I can do was to set-up the minor OR, perform as much debridement as the patient can tolerate, short of actually doing amputations on neglected wounds on the foot of diabetic patients.  All I can do was to re-assure each patient that the condition will get better, that it can’t get any worse. 

 And yet, the very people who survived, had the choice to smile.  Every person had a story, some of them lost all the members of their family, all his property, all his money.  All this person had left was the clothes he was wearing at that time.  And yet he still managed to choose to smile, he chose to continue life, he chose to stand up again after the flood.

 While there were lots of media covering the areas where dead people were being found, lots of photos were taken where lots of people died, and properties lost.  The medical team was focused on the people who were alive.  Where will we start rebuilding if everything was lost.  Ober berkat (Operation Blessing) started with giving food, assuring the health, giving clothes, housing.

 After a week, electricity was back, buses started moving people in between towns, water was pumped in (but still stinky, one got used to anything better than yesterday), then I had a signal from my cell phone, which was on roaming.  From the looks of it, the town was about to rise up again.

 Future plans of the group were to eventually encourage the survivors to re-build their homes.  Start a clinic, a school, and eventually a self-sustaining work place.  Then, among the busy day’s work, rebels tend to put a stop to everything else.  The civil war that ended when the tsunami came, was also starting to regain it’s destructive strength.  It’s complicated.  In rebuilding a community, one takes in the good, as well as the bad.

 Inside the plane, as the medical team goes back, I saw in a magazine this quotation, which very amply states the situation after the tsunami, “the direction of the wind changes all the time, but we can always adjust our sails to get to where we want to go.”