Healing across the world

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GREENFIELD — Steve Long had never had to postpone a meeting because of a tractor before.

Coming from Iowa, the Hancock Health CEO was not unfamiliar with the sight of a tractor, but a recent trip to India was the first time equipment had interrupted a meeting he was leading, he said.

The 13-day trip to Machilipatnam, India, was organized through Caring Community Partners, a group of hospital physicians, administrators, staff and family members seeking to extend the hospital’s mission of care-giving into the community. The group has arranged medical missions to Haiti, Burkina Faso, Mississippi and Alabama in the wake of natural disasters.

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Eight people, including physicians, nurses and administrators, traveled the long journey to the city in India, staying at a Christian mission and teaching first aid, leadership, and medical and non-medical lessons about health care, Long said. The trip begins with an international flight, from the U.S. to Chennai, then a train ride, followed by a bus ride, Long said.

He said the journey across the world was fascinating but subverted his expectations.

“You think you’re going over there to change someone’s life, and they end up changing yours,” he said.

The trip, from Feb. 11 to Feb. 24, was the sixth time Caring Community Partners has traveled to Machilipatnam, a port city of about 170,000 people on the southeast coast of India.

A hospital and attached nursing school — named Hancock School of Nursing — in Machilipatnam stand as a mark of the work of the organization, which first began traveling to the city in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, said Gretchen Pike, who also attended the February journey.

Several hospital staffers came to then-CEO Bobby Keen, requesting to do something to help after the devastating tsunami, Long said. They helped to build a church, hospital and nursing school then, and now in their sixth trip to the area, they are working to help educate both medical professionals and the general public, Long said.

And sometimes, the best place to hold such an educational session was on a public road, Long said. During one such meeting, local medical professionals had set up a canopy over the road, with chairs and tables for those listening to the group from Caring Community Partners. They had to move everything but the canopy for a tractor carrying bags of grain, which Long said was a surreal experience.

It was just one moment highlighting how different rural areas in India are from those in the United States, Long said. He’s traveled to places like Haiti, where poverty is widespread, but India had the most extreme economic disparity he’d seen — some areas looked just like a modern city anywhere in the world, with all the trappings one would expect, while some rural areas illustrated a stark difference, with impoverished citizens living in grass-roof huts or shacks made of scraps and trash, Long said.

In one community, the road ended at a tree which was worshiped as a god for generations by the local residents, Long said.

“You end up in places you can’t believe exist,” he said.

Also jarring for the hospital administrator was seeing people struggle with diseases long eradicated in the United States alongside chronic diseases like diabetes which Hancock Health has been targeting in its own community, he said.

A pastor of the church where the group stayed had polio, and moved through the world by dragging his legs across the ground, Long said; a wheelchair would have been little help in the uneven terrain.

Long also met several children with polio, a sight both tragic and disconcerting: the last case of polio that originated in the United States was in 1979, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Vaccines and public utilities like sanitary sewers and clean tap water have doubled Americans’ life expectancy in the last century, but such things are not guaranteed in rural, impoverished communities in India, he said.

In tiny, rural towns, there’s no running water; instead, the government digs a huge pond that operates as a rainwater collector and site for drinking water, washing and bathing. Polio is transmitted from the fecal matter or saliva of infected people, according to the CDC.

While the small group of medical professionals can’t affect change on the scale of building sanitary sewers, they did what they could to clear up some common misconceptions, including how to treat someone suffering from heat exhaustion, Long said.

Those who have been present for all six of the trips, including Julia Grubbs and Marc Petrey, have seen a lot of changes in the Machilipatnam area since 2004, Long said.

It’s gratifying, both to see improvements and see the residents who have become friends over the years, Pike said.

“We’ve seen the dreams of the mission become reality,” she said. “We’ve built a relationship with the mission, and they’ve become like family to us.”