Mennonite Central Committee

Ohio physician known for work with Amish treats patients displaced by tsunami

June 9, 2005

Years of working with Amish patients and making house calls in rural Ohio has given Dr. Elton Lehman a taste for medicine far from a hospital or laboratory. "I learned to do without everything at my fingertips," he said.

He put that knowledge to work this spring as a short-term Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) worker in this tsunami-devastated area of Indonesia.

Lehman, whose experiences with Amish patients were chronicled in the book "House Calls and Hitching Posts," served on a medical team for MCC partner organization, YAKKUM Emergency Unit (YEU), in March and early April.

Visiting Camps

Six days a week, an Indonesian medical team including Lehman traveled to three or four camps where people displaced by the tsunami were finding temporary shelter — trips that showed him the full devastation of the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami.

As he traveled to camps, he would see piles of rubble that stretched as far as the eye could see and lone buildings standing amid the devastation.

Treating Patients

Lehman treated about 50 to 60 patients a day, many suffering from respiratory problems such as bronchitis, asthma and pneumonia which were caused or exacerbated by living in tents and being exposed to cool, night air. "The days are hot, but the nights are cool. They're out there in the open," Lehman said.

Lehman and the medical team, which included doctors, nurses and medical students, treated some patients who had lacerations from the tsunami that were not sutured and had not healed properly. "Some of my Amish friends don't come in (for medical care) right away, so I'd done that before," Lehman said.

Lehman, who also has experience in short-term medical work in Central America, worked in Indonesia through two translators, fourth-year medical students, to get the patient histories he needed to diagnose illnesses. What he had learned about making diagnoses during house calls and visits to Amish patients and in Central America, proved true in Indonesia as well. With enough information from the patient, appropriate treatment can be made without sophisticated instruments or tests.

He would refer questions to an Indonesian physician he worked alongside. "I told her, 'You know the culture. You know the language,'" he said.

Stories of Devastation

As he treated patients, he also heard stories of personal devastation.

A 26-year-old man told him that he had lost 40 cousins, nieces and nephews. "Another gentleman, I asked how many children he had. He had 12 but lost five in the tsunami," Lehman said.

His two translators had lost 10 of their classmates. One had also lost her grandmother and 14 cousins.

Lehman said he treated patients who were having trouble dealing with the trauma of what they'd been through. "People just couldn't eat, couldn't sleep," he said. And particularly after a March 28 earthquake struck near Nias and its tremors were felt in Banda Aceh, "people were frightened. They were on edge."

Lehman lived in a house with more than a dozen other team members, few of them English-speaking. The 69-year-old wrote the pronunciation for Indonesian phrases on tongue depressors to carry with him and was eager to practice greetings. But most members of the medical team he was with had studied English, and they were equally eager to practice their English skills.

Further Work

After Lehman left Indonesia, another physician, Dr. Clarence Rutt, and his wife Helen served through MCC with YEU in Indonesia. MCC is continuing to seek physicians for short-term assignments in Indonesia.

 

* MCC Canada matching funds from CIDA

Matching funds set aside for MCC Canada by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) provided $180,940 of the $195,200 total project cost.