Reaching Out to Those Most in Need

Sept. 8, 2005 — -- Like many Americans, Kyle Smart felt compelled to provide immediate help after learning about the extent of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. But he decided sending a check from Southern California wasn't going to be enough.

"I just wanted to physically and tangibly go out there and show people that even out in California, we care," said Smart, a 30-year-old family medicine physician and a married father of three young daughters.

The reality of the destruction on the Gulf Coast hit home for him when he heard personal accounts from an old friend whose family lived in Baton Rouge, La.

"When I heard that he had three cousins missing, it was on my front door," he said.

Though several groups he contacted were organizing volunteers to provide medical support, he was told they would not be ready for another week. So last weekend, Smart joined fellow physician Jared Salvo and his friend James Crawley, a real estate agent, for a trip that started at Houston's Astrodome and moved to Baton Rouge, caring for evacuees with medicine and kindness.

It wasn't the first time Smart responded to a natural disaster. In July, he spent 11 days in Sri Lanka where, six months after the tsunami, victims still had unhealed wounds and were gripped by post-traumatic stress and anxiety.

On this trip, he hoped to treat not just victims' physical needs but their emotional, social and spiritual ones as well.

The group found that people were actually faring better at some of the informal shelters set up in municipal offices and churches than at some of those established by the American Red Cross and other groups, because it is considered a liability for them to provide any assistance beyond food and shelter. Counseling is prohibited, as is dispensing over-the-counter medicines to ease headaches and diarrhea.

"The people who were getting help in a holistic manner were better off than the places that weren't offering those things," Smart said.

"They didn't have TV, Internet access. They didn't know how to begin to find their loved ones," he added. "The spiritual aspect, it depends whether an individual wants to get into that. Certainly that's not going on at the Red Cross and not even at the church in some places."

Altogether, Smart and his companions visited about 10 sites and treated about 220 patients for everything from infected cuts to rashes to chronic illnesses like diabetes and HIV for which people had no medication.

"We hit places that hadn't been touched by health care providers," Smart said.

"I expected just to go and do what I could," he added. "We encouraged the evacuees, but serendipitously we encouraged the other volunteers, the pastors, the Red Cross people, the National Guard."

Now that he's been back for a few days, the full impact of the devastation he witnessed has sunk in. "It was exhilarating. It was emotionally draining," he said.

"I think anytime you do something like this, you take away more than you can ever give," Smart added. "In reality, did we even scratch the surface? No, but I think in Baton Rouge we made a difference because we bridged the gap before the cavalry could get there."