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TwitThisThe Religion of Humanity
Most cases are not so dramatic -- after such a horrific cataclysm, some patients just need attention. One woman walks into the tent, slides into a chair and begins sobbing. Her home has been destroyed, and she is terrified of being alone in the world. O'Regan soothes and calms her. "It will be all right," he says.Operation heartbeat's earthquake response is seat-of-the-pants, conceived and spearheaded by a soft-spoken Pakistani American physician named Farzad Najam, who is based at the George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Najam's heart sank when he first heard news of the quake. "I knew we had to do something," he says. So he rounded up as many volunteers as he could and jumped on a plane to Kashmir, where a group of 20 doctors and nurses quickly set up a primitive triage center on the soccer field of a college in the small town of Garhi Dupatta.
It was like walking into hell. The other end of the field was being used as a helipad, and U.S. Army Chinooks were dropping in every 15 minutes. The injuries initially were horrifying -- sheared-off limbs, crushed skulls, compound fractures, internal bleeding. The doctors worked frantically, with limited medications and only the most basic tools. At first, they didn't even have a tent. They laid their patients out on a plastic tarp and treated them in the open air.
Holding everything together was a logistician named Todd Shea. Shea was not a disaster-relief expert and had never been in charge of anything before. But he'd done some volunteer work, most recently in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- where he met O'Regan, who had also stepped up to help. After the quake, O'Regan contacted Shea to see if he could put him to use. "There was no question that Marc would be perfect for this work," says Shea.
Along with O'Regan, a steady stream of physicians from Canada, England, Pakistan and the United States came -- mostly for one- or two-week stints -- to Operation Heartbeat's camp in Garhi Dupatta. Many of the Americans were of Pakistani descent, had grown up in the United States but never visited the country of their heritage.
Shea was deeply respectful of the medical teams. "These doctors are heroes," he said. "I'm only here so they can do their jobs." Still, he relished his role as organizer, supporter and scrounger. One of his first steps was to befriend members of the Pakistani army, which provided transportation and supplies to the remote valleys.
One nearly leveled village was Chikar, located about 18 miles from Garhi Dupatta and still unreachable because of damaged roadways. Abdul Majeed, a local, was standing in the bazaar of this hilltop village when he heard a blast that sounded like tons of dynamite. A mountain about a mile away cracked open, plunging two villages into a tributary of the Jehlum River. The mountain buried hundreds of people in a 400-foot-high natural dam that created two new lakes, one nearly a half-mile long. The sky turned black as dust rose, blocking the sun. The terrified people of Chikar were certain a day of judgment had come.
In the darkness, graves burst open; homes built of stacked stone collapsed, their thick concrete-slab roofs pancaking and crushing inhabitants. Majeed's home was made of mud, not stone. Like many poor people, he had added layers to his house each spring, and over the years the walls and roof had grown to a thickness of nearly two feet. When the rumbling stopped, he ran from the bazaar to check on his family, but neither his wife nor two little grandchildren had survived when the thick earthen ceiling came crashing down.
In Chikar, Operation Heartbeat set up a second field hospital consisting of a few small tents. During its first seven weeks, a handful of exhausted volunteer doctors saw 30,000 patients. They worked without x-rays, labs and sophisticated surgical equipment. Because of language and cultural barriers, they often had to guess at what might be ailing a patient, handing over drugs in the hope that the instructions for taking them would be interpreted correctly -- and then followed.
In nearby Gehl, Marc O'Regan is one day summoned to the hut of a woman who has just given birth. The baby is healthy, but the mother is in pain and bleeding heavily. O'Regan takes a deep breath and nods reassuringly toward the woman's husband, aware that females in this deeply religious region are not typically treated by male physicians. He carefully places his hands beneath the blanket and, palpating the woman's abdominal area, confirms that her uterus has failed to contract, prolonging post-partum bleeding. O'Regan massages her abdomen to stimulate uterine contractions, and soon the bleeding stops. He has probably just saved her life.
Later, reflecting on the incident, he will recall something a grateful Pakistani said to him a few days before: "Humanity is the religion now." It is not lost on O'Regan that the work of international volunteers is helping change attitudes. A young Kashmiri man working at the camp in Garhi Dupatta suddenly stopped O'Regan one day, placed his hands on the volunteer's shoulders and said, "I never met Americans before. I didn't know who you were." He looked O'Regan in the eye, and then made this simple pronouncement: "I like Americans."
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