“The work I'm doing in Sri Lanka seems altruistic,” says Naresh Gunaratnam ‘87, “but I also have selfish reasons for doing it: It helps me focus on those things that matter most to me: my family and my friends.”
The gastroenterologist from Ann Arbor, Michigan's St. Joseph Mercy Hospital is speaking of the humanitarian work he and teams of volunteers are doing in the civil-war-torn and post-Tsunami nation in the Indian Ocean.
Gunaratnam “led the expedition to Grace Care Center, seven acres of paradise in one of the most devastated regions on earth, because of the December tsunami and a 20-year civil war,” said Jim Mitchell, a local reporter with the South Lyon Herald, who traveled with the group and wrote stories about the trip and the work. This publicity in turn yielded more volunteers. Gunaratnam has organized relief teams that have gone out monthly since February.
“Our medical relief crew of thirteen worked at Grace Home for Children, an all-girls' orphanage which we established in 2002,” he says. The orphanage, which houses 102 girls (orphaned mostly by the civil war), is a converted beach resort. “I had traveled there in July 2004 and spent two weeks with the kids (we also built a playground and established a mobile medical clinic, based at the orphanage, which provided free medical care to the poor in the city of Trincomalee).
“We have sent over 30 people, both medical and nonmedical personnel. One of our volunteers is a builder who spent a month at the orphanage and repaired all the girls' rooms and built new shelves for them to store their possessions.”
Given the proximity of the orphanage to the sea, all buildings were damaged by the Tsunami, but miraculously none of the children died. The team of physicians, nurses, social workers, and trauma counselors worked both at the orphanage and the city, providing medical and humanitarian relief.
The physicians worked out of a mobile medical clinic, which provided care in a town called Kinnya, a town surrounded by water, where over 1,000 people died. In the town's only hospital-on the waterfront-all of the more than forty patients, most of the nurses, and other workers died. The only physician in the hospital survived by outrunning the water (he had been a college sprint champion). He ended up performing over 200 autopsies in the next 48 hours.
“Our mobile clinic functioned as a hospital,” says Gunaratnam. “We treated many traumatic injuries (cuts, bruises), and had to deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome patients. We also worked at the main regional hospital (Trincomalee General Hospital) and helped the staff care for victims.
“The nurses and trauma counselors worked mainly at the orphanage, where the children were quite traumatized. Many had lost family members. From their beds they are able to see the ocean, so many had nightmares. The team engaged the children in games and art therapy to help them express their fears and anxieties, and by the time we left, their spirits had improved.
“Our next team of eight leaves in two weeks. This will be a lifelong project for me, and for most of us who have gone there.”
What motivated Gunaratnam to take on a project like this? “I was born in Sri Lanka but left when I was five. My father was a physician in the States, and he always spoke of going back once he retired (I grew up in Cambridge, New York, near Saratoga). He wanted to run a free medical clinic for the poor there. He unfortunately died in 1985, during my sophomore year, from a heart attack. Two days before he died, he had carried my bags up three flights of stairs of Hickok, so his death was quite a shock for me. We were very close, and I always wanted to honor his legacy and thought that doing medical relief work in Sri Lanka would be something he would have been proud of. So when the opportunity arose to lead a relief team to my homeland, the choice was quite easy.
“My two trips in 2004 and early 2005 were awesome, because they helped me reconnect with my heritage and my people. The most important thing though was helping me refocus my priorities. In the U.S., we are such a market-driven culture that we equate happiness with the quantity and value of our possessions. When you have the opportunity to meet and work with some of the poorest people in the world, who have survived a twenty-year civil war, and you see that many are very happy despite their circumstances, you learn a great deal about life. Once you have the basics (food, water shelter), the quality of your life and happiness is derived from the quality of your relationships with friends and family. What I learned from the children is that's what they really value; they really love it when we come and spend time with them. They appreciate the time we spend talking and playing with them. The weeks I have spent there are some of the most memorable and treasured in my life.”
An aside
Naresh Gunaratnam received his M.D. from the University of Virginia and completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut and fellowships in gastroenterology at the University of Michigan and Mayo Clinic. He is married to epidemiologist Dr. Aruna Sarma and they have a daughter, Sejal (5), and a son, Nikhil (2)
At Union, Gunaratnam was a biology major and an honor student. He was Phi Beta Kappa, and he participated in First Annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). He was one of six Union students who received awards for their research papers. His adviser was Research Professor Margaret Schadler. His research experiences at Union motivated him to continue to engage in research in his current position. His research focused on clinical outcomes research in gastroenterology; he has published over a dozen papers and has written seven book chapters based on his work.
For him, “Union was a great place to get an education. It was personable, and I had some very close friendships with my professors and have lifelong friends from my time there. The intimate size of Union allows for those relationships to grow.”
The importance of personal connection has clearly stayed with him and still motivates him, whether at home or in Sri Lanka.
His work in Sri Lanka is not done, and he will be leading more teams of volunteers for the foreseeable future. “If students or anyone else are interested in working with us on future trips,” he urges, “they should contact me or go to the website www.you-shall-love.org for more information.”
Gunaratnam is co-chair of the VeAhavta medical advisory board, which is attempting to develop a sustainable healthcare infrastructure at the Grace Care Center Orphanage in Trincomalee.
VeAhavta (“you shall love” in Hebrew) is an ecumenical nonprofit corporation funding these efforts as part of the mission of providing charitable assistance to low-income, destitute, and displaced persons and promoting peace, understanding, and mutual respect among people of different religions through education.