Knights Bring Hope to Tsunami Victims

Knights Bring Hope to Tsunami Victims

You’ve seen the pictures. The day after Christmas a major earthquake in the Indian Ocean launched massive tsunami waves onto the coastline of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and beyond.

The waves in Sri Lanka were so powerful they shoved an entire passenger train off its tracks and sent cars and boats into treetops.

Maybe you saw newspaper pictures taken from the air: one from two years ago, one taken just last week—both from the exact same view.

One showed lush green tropical gardens, filled with golf courses and beautiful beach front hotels. The other showed the area after the devastation, looking worse than a war zone. No greenery remained, except for a small tree here and there. There was brown mud and driftwood everywhere, driftwood that used to be homes, hotels and shopping areas.

We cannot help but feel compassion for the hurt, grieving peoples of Asia. We feel their loss. We mourn with them. It is hard to imagine the magnitude of such loss and accompanying sorrow.

We who live so removed from that level of tragedy try to put ourselves in the position of those parents searching for their children and children searching for their parents.

Because we’re so far from this tragedy, it can be difficult to feel the unbelievable pain of those who loved the 160,000 who died; parents who had dreams for their children; children left helpless and at the mercy of anyone. Such circumstances are hard to take in.

The TV and newspaper images and stories from Asia have shocked and awed us. Sometimes we had to turn away; after a while we turn off the TV, lest we sink too deeply into grief or face emotional exhaustion. That’s what most of us do.

But not my friend Sir Ed Artis, a West Valley resident and Woodland Hills Rotarian. He got off the couch and followed his heart. He told me he could not "just sit there."

Artis made some calls and mobilized the donation of thousands of dollars of medical supplies. He and two others, Sir Laws and Sir Marcarelli, are members of a charity called Knightsbridge International. The charity supplies hospitals in combat or disaster zones with much needed medicine.

They’re careful, but they’re also relentlessly determined to accomplish their mission. They hitched a ride on a 747 owned by another charity, Global Peace Initiative, which was delivering supplies to the disaster areas.

They were given three seats and a little cargo room. The trio later discovered that boarding the plane was the easy part.

At the airport, aid workers hit their first snag. Twenty-four boxes of quinine that Knightsbridge bought did not clear customs. Quinine is used to treat malaria, but is ineffective against the Sri Lanka strain.

Then more bad news: Customs wouldn’t release the other medicine for more than a day. Artis remained to deal with the situation while the others went to a hotel.

Hours later, Artis showed up with a grin on his face. "I signed all 11 cases out as being for my personal use," he said.

Most aid agencies had to leave supplies at the airport or with the government and its chaotic distribution system. Frequently, boxes end up in a warehouse and either spoil or are sold on the black market.

But once medicine clears customs, aid workers can decide where to take them.

So, Saturday morning the trio loaded the medicine onto a bus, and drove down what used to be beautiful coastline with resorts, fishing villages and small towns. It is now a wasteland.

They found a town with nine emergency refugee camps, each housing 200 people, and a hospital. When the trio of doctors walk into the hospital, smiles erupted.

Patients leaned on their beds to gape at the foreigners, and nurses greeted them with shy handshakes.

Upstairs, in a pediatric ward with torn mattresses, rusted bed frames and poor ventilation, they met 5-year-old Nishka.

She survived the tsunami, but got sick from contaminated water.

They looked at the pharmacy and realized the hospital desperately needed broad-spectrum antibiotics and antifungal lotions—exactly what Nishka needed to get better. The boxes came off the bus, and the nurses carried them off with big smiles.

The Knightsbridge team then traveled two more days to parts of Sri Lanka few foreigners have seen. The Sri Lankan doctors were happy to see the Knights from America.

Inside a hospital, the Knights were shown a stack of photographs nearly three inches thick. One photograph depicted a room full of bodies, with a child’s body facing the camera. His mouth is full of sand. In another, a boy in a coffin wore bright pink pants with lettering that read, "The Starting of a New Millennium."

This is what the land of the "living and the dead" became after the Dec. 26 disaster.

Nearly 3,000 people died in Kilinocchi, and the hospital put photographs of the dead on a computer to help identify them.

Artis told me via instant messaging, "the villages are full of the dead and dying and they are still digging them out of the rubble and destroyed buildings, mostly body parts of many children."

He said the actual scene was much worse than pictures and videos reported.

Artis said he wept more last week than in all his other missions combined.

"I was in Vietnam, and I thought I had seen it all," he wrote. "I was in Rwanda for five months, and I thought I had seen it all.

"But to see what the ocean did to these people. . . ."

Outside a room, the doctors heard a woman screaming and crying; her voice filled the corridors. Her mother just died from a heart condition that Sri Lankan doctors say could have been treated with the right medicine.

The doctors unloaded box after box of medicine, and a few cases of baby food.

Nearly two weeks after the tsunami hit, this was the first aid the hospital has received, even though U.N. vehicles were seen on the road.

A small crowd gathered, but the doctors had to leave. As they walked out the door to drive 10 more hours to Colombo, one nurse nudged a reporter, and pointed to the doctors.

With a shy smile she said, "Sin ta Klaas." The message needed no translation.

The Rev. Jon Wilson lives in Calabasas and is the senior pastor of Canoga Park Presbyterian Church.