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Saskatchewan nurse helps create miracles in Nepal


The driver swings the wheel to avoid a huge mud hole. For several heart-stopping seconds, the four-wheel drive vehicle skitters on the cliff edge, finally halting with one front wheel suspended in mid-air. The valley floor lies hundreds of feet below. The passengers try not to dwell on that as they scramble to safety. Everyone pushes hard, the vehicle gets back onto the dirt track, and they continue on their way.

Ruth McCaslin, who is from Woodrow, Sask., and more recently from Kenora, Ont., has plenty of adventures like this dangerous mountain drive and of breathtaking views of Nepal’s snow-capped mountains, but that’s not what lures her to Pokhra, Nepal. A Mennonite Central Committee nurse, McCaslin travels with International Nepal Fellowship medical teams providing surgeries for poor, desperately sick people in remote villages.

About 10 times each year, she helps pack medicines and surgical instruments into four-wheel drive vehicles, along with drums for water and a generator as most mountain villages don’t have running water or electricity. After hours of driving, and walking when the roads become impassable for vehicles, the medical team arrives to find lines of people waiting for what might be their chance in a lifetime for an operation. For many villagers, the nearest surgical facility would be an impossible two- to three-week walk.

Before patients are seen, the medical team prepares a sterile space. A school or a local clinic is sprayed with formaldehyde, keeping windows and doors closed. Instruments are sterilized in a pressure cooker and then laid out on a flat surface like a hospital bed or a school desk. The team finds a suitable operating table, often propping it up with firewood to make it a comfortable height for the surgeons. From morning to night, they operate, usually performing 40 to 80 procedures in five to seven days and seeing 500 to 1,000 people.

A woman is ferried home on a bicycle by her husband after ear surgery performed by an International Nepal Fellowship medical team that visited Towlihawa, Nepal. MCC nurse Ruth McCaslin makes about 10 trips per year into remote villages in Nepal. MCC photo by Ruth McCaslin

McCaslin has learned to expect the unexpected as word spreads that medical help is available. At the end of one ear surgery camp, a woman showed up with her hand black with gangrene, recalls McCaslin. A week and a half earlier, a wall had fallen on her hand; her bangle bracelet cut through the flesh down to the bone. Although the medical team consisted of ear specialists, they knew the woman would die if her hand was not amputated. That night, they pored over texts and surveyed their fine ear surgery instruments. Rejecting these, they found a hacksaw and sterilized it in the fire. Their ear camp ended with a limb amputation.

Usually doctors and surgeons on the medical teams are from Europe or North America. They give up vacation time to serve in Nepal for several weeks. Often the doctors can’t believe how sick Nepalese villagers are “while continuing to walk around and live their lives”, remarks McCaslin. Many Nepalese simply have to put up with whatever illnesses they have.

The medical teams try to add a training component for local health workers. Generally providing surgical training is not realistic, so the teams focus instead on preventive health. “We might show how to keep ears clean, what treatments will prevent complications that could require surgery,” says McCaslin.

Although the travel and the medical camps are exhausting, McCaslin is not discouraged. “I feel that I can be part of the solution. People are so grateful.”

She cites the example of a 10-year-old deaf boy who received surgery on one ear last January. In November, when McCaslin was helping with another medical camp two difficult travel days away, the boy’s parents brought him by. In the intervening 10 months, the boy had recovered some hearing, had begun school and had learned to read and write.

McCaslin and her husband Walt are members of Woodrow Gospel Church. He is an agriculturist who advises Nepalese non-government organizations. The couple is currently on home leave in Saskatoon.

 – Pearl Sensenig

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Last modified May 4, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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