| mabi |
Posted
on 09-Feb-01 09:47 AM
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/daily/foc/0,8773,98762,00.html
From Our Correspondent: Miracles in the Mountains
Bringing hope to the people of Nepal
By WARREN CARAGATA
Friday, February 9, 2001
Web posted at 06:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 06:00 a.m. GMT
Serendipity changed Jack Starmer's life. One Friday night in 1994, the Massachusetts school teacher and weekend mountaineer got a call from a friend. An expedition was being organized to do survey work on Mount Everest. Did Starmer want to go along? "The next thing I knew, I was at the Everest base camp," he recalls. That phone call changed Starmer's life and the lives of many others.
It may have been Everest that brought Starmer to Nepal, but he keeps returning to the land that claims eight of the world's 10 tallest peaks because of the conditions he found there. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Asia, a land where children die of diseases, such as diarrhea, that are only a nuisance in developed countries, a land where most people will not reach the age of 60. Most of us have probably seen misery and injustice from a car window and wished someone could do something to help. Starmer is one of those few people who stop the car.
Now living in a small town near Philadelphia, he has a business card that grandly announces he is the director of the America-Nepal Alliance for Health. The alliance exists all right, but it runs out of a den in Starmer's house, it has no budget and depends only on what he and his friends can raise. It exists because of his energy and commitment, and that of the people he has drawn in. On his last trip to Nepal, Starmer's luggage contained a donated computer and a portable anesthesia machine that he says generated intense scrutiny at airport check-in counters.
When Starmer first went to Nepal, he was also involved in an AIDS education program in Boston. Not unnaturally, he started to look at what was being done on the subject in Nepal. The answer? Not very much. Little was known about the disease, and its victims were often treated as outcasts when they returned to their villages. Starmer thought he could help. Two years later, he had quit his job, leaving it to his wife, also a teacher, to bring in the salary to support the family. Starmer's alliance now works with the BP Memorial Health Foundation in Kathmandu, which is setting up a center where AIDS patients can receive specialized treatment and where health-care workers can receive training on how to deal with HIV/AIDS. Although there are no exact numbers, as many as 40,000 Nepalese are thought to be infected.
But it is the other work the alliance does that is perhaps more intriguing. Starmer, using a growing network of friends in the medical business, and, increasingly, the power of e-mail, organizes medical camps in remote areas. He and his associates bring medical care to people who may have never before seen a doctor. In one case, an 18-year-old girl who had been in labor for several days was brought in on a stretcher, carried by her family for eight hours from a village inaccessible by road. The doctors Starmer brings in cover their own costs. Last year, Seattle anesthesiologist Dr. Martin Silverman brought an anesthesia machine with him. Strapped onto a truck for a precarious journey into the back country of western Nepal, the man and his machine were able to perform what must have seemed like miracles. Sometimes, modern medicine must make compromises when it is brought so far off the beaten track. In one case, Starmer says, a doctor used an autoclaved Swiss army knife for an amputation. In another, a patient needed an electrocardiogram but the machine required an electrical ground. Water was dumped beside the machine, which was then grounded to the puddle. The machine worked flawlessly.
The flow of doctors works both ways. Later this year, with donations from the alliance, a Nepalese surgeon and cardiologist will be going to Boston for two months' training and a chance to work with top specialists. And the benefits also flow both ways. Doctors from Western countries who give up a few weeks of their time usually come away with a re-kindled passion for their profession. One physician told Starmer she could now remember why she decided to become a doctor.
The work that Starmer and his colleagues do will never vault Nepal up the world health-care ladder, but they know that they make a difference. At one recent camp, an opthamologist performed some 70 cataract operations. People arrived at the camp barely able to see and they "left with their sight," Starmer says. The Alliance for Health may not be the biggest organization around, but for those 70 people, and the others that it has helped along the way, it assuredly is the most important.
The alliance will soon have a website at www.nepalhealth.org
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