Dr. Paul Harper ’64 says he can’t fully explain his willingness to endure what he called hell on earth as part of a volunteer international medical team that responded when the tsunami destroyed Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra in December 2004, killing hundreds of thousands.
“But I can say it was in the spirit of the Edmundites,” the New Hampshire surgeon said at the start of a narrated slideshow that he delivered during June’s Reunion Weekend in a St. Edmund’s Hall classroom for his classmates and their spouses.
Harper promised to take his audience “into a world you’ve never been to before,” which was indeed an understatement. The slides he showed and stories he shared, originally assembled to help prepare medical personnel heading to Third World disaster sites left no doubts about the staggering human challenges Harper and his fellow International Medical Corps volunteers faced on this mission.
One of the first slides that Harper showed was of an anguished woman he encountered on the day of his arrival. Harper described his dramatic, heart-breaking and ultimately futile attempts to save one of her imperiled family members, and yet, this woman told the angrily distressed doctor through a translator, “Don’t curse God. At least I have somebody to bury.”
Harper soon saw what she was talking about in all-too-vivid details dramatizing the force and size of the wave. He showed photos of a child’s tricycle in a tree; others showed beaches filled with shoulder-to-shoulder corpses, or clothing and bodies hanging from trees considerably up the side of an inland hill. He took shots of a demolished soccer stadium where, he said, huge numbers of spectators were swept out to sea. Almost every building in that vicinity was flattened except, curiously, a nearby Catholic Church and Islamic Mosque.
One slide showed how Harper once “actually rode an elephant to work,” the giant beast being the only practical way to reach a site where they were needed. Repeated scenes of squalor in his slides were overwhelming. Other slides showed amazing transformations that Harper’s team oversaw to create improvised treatment areas. Tetanus, measles and leprosy were just a few of the diseases they faced.
Amid the horrors, glimpses of hope and humanity kept Harper and his colleagues going. Among his slides too were shots of beautiful smiling children, grateful patients and instances of close camaraderie among the volunteers. Harper’s stories illustrated how many of the group became ingenious black-market or bureaucratic operators to secure vital supplies or to make necessary things happen.
The experience haunted him for some time after his return to his comfortable life in New Hampshire, but also gave him new perspective on the complaints of patients back home who really aren’t so bad off after all, he and his wife, Dianne, said following the presentation.
A biology major at Saint Michael’s, Harper earned his medical degree from New Jersey College of Medicine. He did a residency in family practice in Michigan, a preceptorship in ob/gyn surgery with the U.S. Air Force in North Dakota and a residency in general surgery at Jersey City Medical Center. He also has extensive post-doctoral training on special procedures, including at Harvard, Brown and Temple Universities, and is a licensed physician and surgeon, board-certified in general surgery with extensive experience and training in general surgery, laparoscopic cholecystectomy, laser surgery, gynecology and general practice. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and has a practice with Derry Surgical Associates in Londonderry.
“In the end,” he said of his tsunami relief work, “I think we converted a lot of people” to think better of Americans and the rest of the world just because of the humane quality of repeated personal interactions stripped of divisive politics and ideology.
As Harper and his crew headed down the road to depart after their life-changing month in Banda Aceh, he turned and snapped one last dramatic photo of a sight that first surprised and then deeply moved him: Arching boldly over the scene of so much heartache was a bright double-rainbow. :—By Mark Tarnacki
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