'I felt very helpless': Calgary doctors return from Bangladesh volunteer medical mission

With the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar continuing to rise, a trio of Calgary doctors travelled to Bangladesh last month as part of a volunteer mission providing medical relief in a camp where hundreds of thousands now live.

Sadly, many in those refugee camps are sick and there aren't enough local doctors or medical supplies there to properly treat them.

Having practised medicine in Canada for the past 18 years, Dr. Fozia Alvi was joined on the 10-day mission by Dr. Fizza Rafiq and Dr. Sameena Bajwa as part of aICNA Relief Canadaeffort.

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On Friday, Alvi spoke to The Homestretch hours after arriving home about her experience and their hopes to continue providing aid to the region.

Below is an abridged version of that conversation.

Q: Why did you want to go to Bangladesh in the first place?

A: I heard about the hunger crisis for the last two years but I did not know the situation until I started to research. ICNA Relief Canada, they contacted me actually, they wanted me to go there and do a survey. I saw in the videos and did my own research, I thought, 'I'm needed there.' That's why I went.

Q: How would you describe the conditions of the refugee camp and the medical centres where you were working?

A: I do not have any words to explain that. There is an acute shortage of medication. There are not enough medications and life-saving drugs. There are about 90,000 pregnant women and lots of people are arriving every day and people have walked for days in the jungle, for 10 to 14 days, hungry, eating banana leaves on their way then they crossed the border and entered into refugee camps.

There are lots of sick kids, I have seen lots of illnesses that I have not seen in my 18-year medical career. Lots of respiratory illnesses, every other child with pneumonia. There were no diagnostic imaging, no x-rays, no labs that I could do any work-up for them.A horrible situation.

Q: What kind of conditions are the people living in right now in those camps?

A: They are living in clusters. There are about 12 camps total, and there about 70,000 registered people who are living in each camp. There are lots of unregistered people there. They are sharing small tents.I have seen lots of young children they were naked running around in the streets.

There is a lack of proper washrooms, they need sanitation there. There is a lack of clean water, they have put some drinking water pumps but it's not enough. It's very, very poor.

Q: What was it like for you to work in those conditions?

A: I felt very helpless because there is limited resources. I worked with a Bangladeshi team, the doctors who were working there, they were fresh out of medical school, they have limited experience, their medical knowledge was limited and there are a lot of illnesses there.

There's a lot of diseases going on like active outbreaks of tuberculosis. In my 18 years of practise working in the U.S. and Canada, I have not seen a single patient with tuberculosis, and there, in one day, I saw four patients.Those patients needed treatment but there was no way I could send them anywhere.

Q: So what could you do then?

A: We did not have any tuberculosis medication [but] there was a local family hospital close to those camps. We could refer them, only for those people who have the refugee card, the people who don't have the card, we could not do anything.

Q: How many people lost their lives while you were there?

A: A huge number of people are pregnant women and the [babies] are being delivered in the tents because they cannot leave the tents at night. Nobody is allowed to leave the camps at all. So [babies] are being delivered at night, there's no doctors available at night, there is no electricity, there are no cell phones.

The night before we arrived, one woman died of a hemorrhage she bled to death. There are no ambulances, there is no transport and there's no female doctors. There are very few doctors there.I saw lots of pregnant patients there who needed urgent C-sections, they were nine months pregnant, and I could not transfer them anywhere because they did not have the registered card.

I felt very helpless, this was the first time I felt that helpless in my life.

Q: You have so many people packed together in those clusters, when someone is suffering from tuberculosis or some other communicable disease, the situation is only going to get worse, isn't it?

A: Everybody is at risk. There are young children, infants, everybody is at risk. Even the doctors did not have masks.

Q: Did you get any sleep while you were there?

A: I did not sleep at all in the 12 days I spent there. At nighttime, when I was in my bed, I kept on thinking about those patients, that they are losing their lives because they do not have any access to healthcare.

To save hundreds of thousands of people, we need to have urgent medical supplies, we need to have medication to help them, we need to provide them good sanitation, we need to give them clean drinking water, we need to have some doctors there who have at least five years of experience, so they can treat those patients.

We need to stop the outbreaks. We need to put those patients in isolation but there are hundreds of thousands of people living there, so I don't know how they are going to do it or what's going to happen in the next few months, especially with winter coming up.

Q: What are you going to do now that you are back in Canada to spread the message.

A: My message to my fellow Canadians is to donate generously to this cause so we can help them. We can buy some life-saving medication for them. We can give them food, we can give them clothesand we can provide them clean drinking water. I also want my fellow doctors to donate their time. Two weeks, a week, anything will be helpful.

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