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Dayton Daily News 
Heading south from Colombo on National Highway A2, there is nothing to see but the boats, the ocean and the ruins of destroyed cities. Near Galle, a city where nearly 4,500 people died, a sudden turn reveals a 100 yards of pristine houses, protected from the waves by a small hill. A billboard reads, "Welcome to Galle. It gets better every day. "Dr. James Laws pulls out his camera and shoots off some video. "That's another one for the scrapbook," he says. Laws is far from his home in Germantown. A week and a half ago he was checking out patients as a cardiologist at Grandview Hospital in Dayton. On Saturday, he was on the other side of the world, riding a bus for more than 10 hours on a devastated coastal highway in Sri Lanka. Laws is here on a simple mission — to deliver boxes of medicine to a hospital that sorely needs it. In reality, it is anything but simple. It has taken him more than a week to get from Dayton to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. It will take another six hours of hard driving to get to the hospital. The next morning at 6:30, the doctor has to be at the airport to catch a flight to Jaffna, on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, and time is running out. Laws is getting antsy. "Man, I tell you, we are flying by the seat of our pants," he says. War stories Laws has a book he carries with him. It is called The World's Most Dangerous Places. The evening he arrives in Sri Lanka he checks another country off the list. In Germantown, Laws tends to his garden. He collects German daggers. He wants to build a pond or two in his backyard, but even after reading nearly 20 books on the subject he hasn't made much progress. He worries constantly about his driving tickets. But here, after a couple of drinks (he likes cognac), he leans back in his chair and tells war stories. "So this one time, we're in Rwanda," he says. "It's the middle of the slaughter, and we've got all this medicine to deliver. We're in this 5-star hotel, but it's been stripped bare. There's bodies all over the place — in the swimming pool, on the staircase, everywhere. "Laws, Ed Artis and their third partner on this trip, Rob Marcarelli, don't just read about the world's most dangerous places in books. They and two others make up a charity called Knightsbridge International that does one thing — supply hospitals across the world in combat or disaster zones with much-needed medicine. They're careful in what they do, but they're also relentlessly determined to accomplish their mission. "I tell you one thing, I better not die from a coconut falling on my head," Artis jokes when he talks about his obituary. "You better make up something real good. "Knightsbridge International hitched a ride to Colombo on somebody else's plane. A 747 belonging to another charity, Global Peace Initiative, was delivering supplies to areas hit by the tsunami, and gave them three seats and a little cargo room. Laws, Artis and Marcarelli jumped on. That was the easy part. The plane landed in Colombo airport Friday morning. The airport is being run by U.S. Marines, the New York Air National Guard and other American military teams because the government of Sri Lanka didn't have the resources to handle all the planes flying in with relief supplies after the tsunami killed 30,000 people and left more than one million homeless. At the airport, the aid workers hit their first snag. The 24 boxes of quinine that Knightsbridge has bought can't go through customs. The drug is used to treat malaria but is ineffective against the strain of malaria in Sri Lanka.They put the boxes away. Then they got more bad news: The rest of the medicine wouldn't be released for more than a day. They left Artis behind to handle the complications and headed to a hotel. Hours later, Artis shows up with a grin on his face. "I signed all 11 cases out as being for my personal use," he says. Most aid agencies end up having to leave their supplies at the airport or with the government — leaving it up to a chaotic distribution system to pass out the relief. More often than not the boxes end up in a warehouse somewhere, and either get spoiled or are sold off on the black market. But by getting the medicine through customs, the aid workers can decide where to take them. And they know exactly where they want them to go — rebel-held Sri Lanka. In the 20 years of civil war, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE rebels, have carved out a corner of the country in the northeast. After the tsunami hit, few news crews or independent observers have been able to get to the rebel-held territory, and little is known of the damage there. But one thing is clear as soon as one lands in the airport — anything that comes to Colombo stays in the south. "That makes it so much more important that we can get it there," Laws said. "Those pharmacies are going to be bare. "But that isn't going to fly in this part of the world. They have to divvy up the supplies to maintain neutrality — half for the south, half for the north. And on this day they will head south. With the quinine gone, they still think that each half of the supplies will keep a small hospital serving about 100 people going for six months — long enough for them to come back with another load. And so, on Saturday morning, they load the medicine into the back of a bus, and drive down what used to be beautiful coastline with nothing but resorts, fishing villages and small towns along the way. They plan to get past Galle, a region that was almost entirely devastated but also one that has received most of the aid. Past Galle, past the International Red Cross tents and crowds of people who stand in line for food and water, past the disaster tourists who look at railroad tracks twisted into coils by the side of the road, they reach the small town of Tallangalle. There, some 40 miles south of Galle, they find a town with nine emergency refugee camps that hold about 200 people each — and a hospital. When Laws and his group of doctors walk in, smiles break out. Patients lean on their beds to gape at the foreigners, and nurses greet them with shy handshakes. The District Medical Officer shows up and gives them a tour. Upstairs, in a pediatric ward with torn mattresses, rusted bedframes and barely any ventilation, 5-year-old Nishka is lying on a bed. She survived the tsunami but was sick from drinking the contaminated water that likely washed down her throat, giving her an infection. "Can we see the pharmacy please?" Laws asks the doctor. But the keys to it were nowhere to be found. The pharmacy is kept locked to prevent theft, and the doctor wants Knightsbridge to drop off the supplies anyway. "Ain't happening," Laws says. "I've been in a lot hospitals in a lot of countries, and this guy either shows me the pharmacy or we take what we have and we leave. "Just as Laws and the other doctors start climbing into the bus to leave, the keys are found. They take a look at the pharmacy and realize that what the hospital really needed was broad-spectrum antibiotics and anti-fungal lotions — exactly what 5-year-old Nishka needs to get better. The boxes come off the bus, and the nurses carry them off with big smiles. On Sunday morning the Knightsbridge team had plans to fly to the former Tamil stronghold of Jaffna, then travel for two days to parts of Sri Lanka few foreigners have ever seen. But on Saturday night, they plan on relaxing as much as they can. They've seen to it that the sick in this remote, devastated part of the world will at least have some medicine on the shelves of their local hospital. And in the process they've added another tale to their collection. |
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