Why?

Immediately following the tsunami in December 2004, Gene was sent to Sri Lanka to run logistics for a medical aid organization. The NGO had a few projects, but one of them was a hospital in the north that had been badly damaged - not during the tsunami, but by neglect during the intense civil war. I joined him a month later (as a logistician/ administrator for the same organization), and we spent 2005 rehabilitating a 100-bed hospital. The hospital was in bad shape - it had been running with the help of two local nurses - each working one 12-hour shift a day- and a group of volunteers, and the ER, operating theatre, and several of the wards had been shut down and boarded up. The ambulance was gone, and anyone who needed to be transferred to a different hospital had to hitch a ride. There were holes in the roof and monkeys and cows roaming the halls. The medical NGO brought doctors, nurses, midwives, and gene and I, and while the medical staff dealt with snake bites, elephant attacks, and plenty of colds, gene and I worked with a huge staff to make the hospital back into what it had been.

We built fences, repaired rooves, added walls, ran electricity, decked out a 4x4 to be an ambulance, cleaned things, plastered things, painted things, poured concrete, added furniture, built a medical incinerator, repaired bathrooms, and the list goes on and on and on...

We lived in a tent for most of that time, and survived off of delicious rice and curry and amazing coffee. The temperature was always - morning, noon, and night - in the mid 90s, the humidity was always 80%, and the monsoon rains arrived every day at 2. We were next to the equator so the sun rose at 6 and set at 6. We wore sarongs and saris got around town on bicycles. The town was incredibly clean - like portland, the rain washed away any dirt and kept everything green - and the population incredibly well educated (The Sri Lanka literacy rate is well above 90%) and completely wonderful and charming.

We wanted to stay; when we left we were beyond exhausted. We'd been surviving for months with almost no sleep, and we were so far off the grid that a phone call home or to the nearest town cost $5/minute on the satellite phone. So we went home and spent a few months sleeping. We felt horrible about this - we'd made the very best of friends and we felt like we were letting them down - we could walk away and they couldn't.

The ongoing civil had been at a ceasefire when we were there, but it started up again after we left, and in August of 2008, the town we worked in became the front line. Most of the town was destroyed or heavily damaged and the hospital -in the center of town- probably was as well. Our friends and neighbors were moved into camps and - thanks to the help of family - we wired them money so that they could buy firewood and water and rice. People died in the fighting and people died in the camps as well.

And then the war ended in 2009 and people were released and allowed to return home. They were given money to rebuild and they returned to the town.

And now - in December 2010- we're headed to visit. We've decided to bring a donation to the hospital; it's a very important place to us, and this holiday season- more than any other gift- we want that community and our friends to have it once again. Because of that, we're asking people who would otherwise give us gifts to please help us by donating to this instead.

However, we aren't entirely sure of the status of the place (but we hear there are doctors!), and if we discover that the hospital is in much better shape than we think it is, may may shift the donation to the local schools. Or perhaps peace will have finally brought prosperity to the region, and we'll bring the money back.

It will be an interesting journey.

peace,
christi