JOEL THURTELL: Sri Lanka Calling: Plymouth-Canton Health Professionals Aid Stricken Nation
By Detroit Free Press
Jan. 21–I got to know Cheryl Huckins more than 20 years ago when we were neighbors in Plymouth. Our kids were the same age and they were buddies.
Cheryl, an MD, had a medical practice in Ann Arbor back then, and I have this vivid memory of watching her lug a box full of patient files back and forth between house and car. She worked many hours at home as well as in her office, and I thought she must be obsessed with her job.
When my wife became a doctor I saw the same behavior, and I realized that while it indeed may be obsessive, medical people are under pressures we civilians can barely imagine.
When I recently heard that Huckins had taken on the co- directorship of a nursing home in Sri Lanka, literally halfway around the world, I was amazed.
“How do you find the time?” I asked her.
“My kids are gone now,” she said. Her two sons and a daughter are adults, on their own.
“Life changes,” she said. “It’s been a bit hard to leave the work responsibilities, but I just love it.”
Huckins specializes in caring for nursing home patients in Ann Arbor. That specialty was in demand at Sri Lanka’s Grace Care Center, the elder-care home where she’s worked on four 2-week stints in the past two years.
There was a need in civil war-torn Sri Lanka for someone with expertise in treating older patients in a nursing home. But she’s also worked with girls in an orphanage that shares a campus with the Grace Care Center.
Huckins is one of four women with Plymouth, Plymouth Township or Canton connections to work at this campus near Trincomalee, a deepwater port in Sri Lanka.
Lori Kostoff of Canton is a pharmacist. In August 2004, she went to Sri Lanka to organize a pharmacy for the orphanage and a mobile medical clinic.
She heard about the elder-care and orphanage projects during a presentation at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital near Ann Arbor.
“I had always had a desire to do missionary work,” she said. Kostoff went to Sri Lanka late in summer 2004. Like her colleagues, she used vacation time and paid for the $2,000 airline ticket herself. In Sri Lanka, she tried to buy pharmaceuticals.
“I didn’t know the pricing, and to be honest we got a little ripped off,” Kostoff said.
Later, things went better. It became easy, because in Sri Lanka, “You don’t need a prescription to purchase drugs at a pharmacy,” she said. “You can walk into a pharmacy and buy amoxicillin,” a treatment for infections.
She learned to order in bulk and get discounts.
Eventually, her efforts led to her opening a small pharmacy for the elder-care home and orphanage.
The work was exciting. “You were up at 5:30 a.m. and you literally worked until dinnertime.
“The gratifying part to me was to see the pharmacy we have today,” Kostoff said.
She planned to go back in 2005, but “my main reason for canceling was the political unrest was beginning again, and I got a little nervous.”
A nondenominational charity known as VeAhavta — Hebrew for “You shall love,” Huckins said — established the orphanage and care center.
Huckins learned of VeAhavta’s work at St. Joseph Mercy after the December 2004 tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people in Sri Lanka and destroyed homes and fishing boats that were the livelihood for many.
Huckins has traveled four times to Sri Lanka. On one trip, she took her husband, attorney Lynn Helland, and their younger son, Kelsey. Lynn Helland helped fishermen negotiate a contract for their cooperative and Kelsey Helland worked on construction.
Tara Rondy is a physical therapist who lives in Plymouth. She trained local staff how to move elderly patients and how to help them exercise to gain strength.
“It was probably the best experience of my life, and makes me want to go back,” Rondy said.
Gina Amalfitano of Ann Arbor is a physician who practices in the Henry Ford clinic in Plymouth Township. With Cheryl Huckins, she is codirector of the elder-care home.
Amalfitano has made three trips to Sri Lanka. She runs the clinic at the nursing home and the orphanage from long distance, but says that the local staff, trained by Americans, is taking more responsibility.
“I’ve always liked to work in situations with people who are without a lot of resources,” said Amalfitano. “There’s the personal good feeling of being appreciated by doing something for people who don’t have much.”
“I like to pull something out of nothing,” she said.
Amalfitano last visited Sri Lanka six months ago, but she’s connected to the center by e-mail and spends a fair amount of time working for the clinic.
How does she find time? “You sleep less,” she said. “We don’t maybe do as much going places on the weekend. …”
The tsunami made many refugees, but there have been refugee camps near the elder-care center for decades because of the civil war, Amalfitano said.
“It’s a beautiful country with beautiful beaches,” said Huckins. But the civil war and the tsunami devastated the place.
In February 2005, she went to Sri Lanka with social workers and trauma specialists who “worked with kids who had lost loved ones in the tsunami or the civil war.”
“A lot of children have seen some pretty awful things, like their father being decapitated, or they have seen family members washed away in the tsunami.
“We went to a hospital and met with doctors and it’s just amazing the lack of resources they have,” Huckins said.
The Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, are dominant; they’re at war with the minority Tamil, who are Hindu. The elder-care center and orphanage are in a largely Tamil area. The government steers aid away from the Tamil, so what the Americans provide is significant, she said.
What do the people need most?
“They need peace,” said Huckins. “They need money. They need volunteers, people with special skills.”
Contact JOEL THURTELL at 248-351-3296 or thurtell@freepress.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press
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