Plainsboro resident volunteering in Sri Lanka.
By: Jennifer Potash
PLAINSBORO As a nurse, Jackie Carey has tended to the medical needs of residents living in dire poverty in Third World countries but that experience may pale compared to what she has found on her latest mission to a tsunami-ravaged village in Sri Lanka.
"I’ve seen plenty of suffering and plenty of poverty but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like this, this level," said Ms. Carey, hours before departing for Sri Lanka on Jan. 9. "This is chaos."
Ms. Carey, 55, joined by two American doctors and nurses and a British team, is on a mission to Kattankudy, Sri Lanka, with Doctors Worldwide.
"In the end it’s not about politics, not about economics, not about religion, it’s people helping people," said Ms. Carey, a Lansing, Mich., native who now lives in Princeton Landing. "Helping them until they can help themselves."
Kattankudy, an eastern coastal village with a population of 50,000, was decimated with 200 dead and 9,000 homeless or displaced, of whom about 5,000 are in refugee camps, according to Doctors Worldwide.
The village’s hospital was badly damaged and photos on Doctors Worldwide show wards littered with debris and mud, windows blown out and tiles ripped and dangling from the ceilings.
"Hospitals, schools, everything is gone," Ms. Carey said. "They have people literally in refugee camps, some in tents, but many of them are sleeping on the ground and open to the elements."
The Doctors Worldwide team is setting up medical care for the displaced residents to care for injuries and trying to contain the spread of diseases such as typhoid, cholera and dysentery.
Another serious threat to the tsunami survivors are poisonous snake bites.
Lack of clean drinking water is a problem as sand infiltrated the wells but residents are still drinking the dirty water, Ms. Carey said.
"The coastal village towns just don’t have the information they need to be safe," she said.
A registered nurse who has spend her career in management, Ms. Carey is the director of perioperative and emergency services at St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick.
She is grateful for the hospital’s willingness to allow her to go on the mission and its generosity in donating medicine and other supplies.
She has been volunteering for personal as well as medical causes for many years participating in medical missions all over the globe including China, the Philippines, Ecuador and Venezuela with other organizations such as Heal the Children and Operation Smile.
An avid traveler, Ms. Carey recently returned home from a month-long excursion to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
Meeting the medical needs of the survivors is one component, but dealing with the emotional issues is another, she said.
"The hardest thing I think about this kind of volunteering is you can’t take care of everybody, so you leave with people still needing a lot of help," she said. "There’s tears and begging and (residents pleading), ‘Please take my child’ and that is the hardest."
That parting, while painful, is never the end, she said.
"You can’t fix it all, but be able to do what you can and when you leave, realize hopefully you’ll be able to get back again," she said.
Doctors Worldwide and other aid organizations in the disaster-afflicted region are committed to rebuild the county in a process that will take more than 10 years, she said.
Her family worries during these missions but also is comforted by Ms. Carey’s devotion to detail and safety.
" I think they’re a little anxious, but again I’ve done a lot of it," she said. "There’s nothing quite like this but you manage your risks."
Ms. Carey’s adult daughter, also a nurse, has participated in medical relief missions as well.
"If she weren’t pregnant she would be going on the trip, " Ms. Carey said. Despite the risks from snakes, disease, downed electrical wires the missions also benefit Ms. Carey and the other aid workers.
"And I will tell you, after you’ve gone and done something like this, you come back a very different person," she said. "That wide-eyed child on the other side of the globe isn’t the only one who benefits from this. It’s the people who are over there, helping hands-on, who gain at least as much."

