Not a single tree seems to be standing from the air.
You could just see piles of rubble on the side of the roads.
Telephone wires hanging down and the destruction was just vast.
It was completely quiet.
We constantly monitor world events
and when big disasters happen we are usually in contact
with the organizations with whom we work.
And that's when the phone calls start to see is this a disaster
that would benefit from our help and can we coordinate something?
And for the Philippines event just this past December,
we had over 300 volunteers.
We ended up sending 27 people.
Within 36 hours we had the first team ready to go out the door.
We were able to complete our mission
and wrap up within four weeks.
When we arrived in Tacloban City,
we arrived on the airstrip with a lot of evacuees there but you
can sense that there was a sense of calm, a sense of order.
People looked at you and instead of looking desperate
they looked grateful that we were there to help.
The best place for us to be was in Carigara which was a district
hospital about an hour and a half north of Tacloban City and
so it was an existing hospital that didn't have any staff
because the staff had been injured or because the staff was
rebuilding their homes or taking care of their family business.
We ended up staffing this hospital which worked well given
the skill sets that we had and the pool of physicians that we
could get from the United States.
In addition to working in the hospital and staffing it,
we also opened up mobile clinics and
that was done in Tacloban City.
We've had physicians and nurses doing volunteer work and
international relief work for decades and the landmark event
was the tsunami in 2005 because that was the first regionally
coordinated effort to do any kind of relief work
and we've built the Global Health Program since then.
And we make get 50 people out the door just for that event.
We've created affiliations with Doctors Without Borders,
Relief International, International Medical Corps,
and now we're working with an organization
called Team Rubicon.
So we coordinate our efforts of giving both the human resources,
the personnel with the expertise,
as well as the financial support to do the relief work.
For all of the different programs we have,
I would say we're getting somewhere,
without a big disaster event, probably 20 to 40 people
out every year doing volunteer work.
If a community is struck by disaster, there can be
situations where they never recover back to a new normal
where they're always struggling.
So it's important to go in and actually help them so that they
can recover to a new normal level so that they can continue
to provide healthcare to its community members.
By the time I had left people were laughing and joking.
They had electricity. Businesses were open.
We actually went out and went for pizza one night.
I mean, it was really shocking how quickly
the Filipino people recovered during this event.
There's tremendous need around the world for assistance,
especially in healthcare, and so to be able to
fill that need at least in a small way
is tremendously valuable and helpful.
I couldn't be more delighted to work for an organization
that supports this kind of work.
The reason I continue to go back to disaster medicine is because
I feel that I have the skills and the background
as well as the experience to do it.
I have that ability and I think it's important for people who
have this ability and the experience to go into
disaster zones to help communities build their
healthcare system and recover back to normal.
And I think this is what we need to do
to make our world a better place.