Cover story: Dr. Sarah Beekley responds to medical emergency in tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka Cover story: Dr. Sarah Beekley responds to medical emergency in tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka (March 16, 2005)

By Marjorie Mader

Almanac Staff Writer

The e-mail to Kaiser Permanente doctors in Northern California contained a simple question: "What can we do to help?"

Dr. Sarah Beekley, who grew up in Atherton and is now a pediatrician with Kaiser in Redwood City, was the first to respond. And her message was equally simple: "Anything you do, I want to help."

The messages were exchanged as the world listened in shock to the news of mounting casualties and destruction from the tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean on December 26, leaving massive devastation along coastal Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Dr. Beekley had connections in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan paternal grandfather of her two daughters had worked in multiple ministries in the Sri Lankan government.

There was no doubt in her mind that Kaiser would respond to what she described as "a disaster outside of human comprehension."

Many Kaiser employees and patients are from Asia and were affected by the disaster. International relief efforts, she says, are part of Kaiser's commitment to provide medical aid and health care over a sustained period to people affected by disaster. Kaiser also is donating $1 million to the tsunami-relief efforts.

Within a couple of days, Dr. Beekley, on a conference call with Kaiser physicians, got the go-ahead.

Two small volunteer teams of Kaiser physicians left on staggered flights January 12 and 17. Four doctors headed for Colombo, Sri Lanka; three went to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the area hardest hit by the tsunami.

Dr. Beekley and Dr. Christine Fernando, an internist from Sacramento, traveled together on the flight to London, then on the 11-hour leg to Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo.

They zipped through customs, each carrying three huge bags of pharmaceutical supplies.

After checking with authorities, they made an eight-hour drive to Batticaloa, a small city on the eastern coast. It would be their base for the next two and a half weeks. One of the Kaiser doctors knew the bishop of Trincomalle, who welcomed them with open arms and arranged for housing and food.

The housing arrangements seemed minimal -- a couple of rooms with a bed, a toilet and running water in a building without windows, recalls Dr. Beekley. But after coming back from field camps and seeing long lines of patients, she says, she was "so grateful to have a bed, running water, a toilet and food.

"It's all about your reference point."
'Overwhelmed'

In Batticaloa, 66,000 people were homeless, living in refugee camps and subsisting on rice and lentils. There were no latrines. One hospital, offering the most basic primary medical care, served the entire district of 1.4 million people, says Dr. Beekley.

"The government was completely overwhelmed," she says. "If it hadn't been for the outpouring of international aid, the people would not have food, shelter and water.

"Their homes and neighborhoods were completely devastated, reduced to rubble," she says.

A church, a mosque or a temple, reinforced with steel rebar, would be standing in the midst of rubble.
Seven days a week

The Kaiser doctors visited the Batticaloa Disaster Health Response Team, the best-organized disaster relief team on the island, says Dr. Beekley.

The team assigned the doctors to provide medical care at four refugee camps, about two to three hours away. Working seven days a week, the doctors visited each camp twice weekly.

"Our reception came to be repeated at every camp we entered," wrote Dr. Beekley in her daily reports. "The officials greeted us with respect and dignity; the (healthier) children with curiosity and open-hearted joy on their faces. The parents' faces (told the) most: shock, despair, hope, uncertainty."

Mothers brought their children to the doctors' tables set up under the shadiest trees, but they rarely would ask for medical care for themselves.

Fifty percent of those lost near Batticaloa were children, and these displaced families were the ones who had lost them. Often the children were torn from their parents' arms by the force of the waves, says Dr. Beekley.

"The hardest faces to watch were those who were suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). They would stare into space, their faces grimacing, as they relived the terror over and over," she says.

Dr. Fernando, who speaks three languages -- English, Tamal (the language of the district) and Senegalese -- provided what counseling she could.

"Only later and in private would she weep for them and for all the sadness seen by her fellow Sri Lankans," says Dr. Beekley. "We all cried daily."

People would line up for treatment of colds, pneumonia, respiratory diseases, dysentery, infected wounds and chronic illnesses.

Others would come to watch. The doctors would write a note referring patients they couldn't treat to a general hospital. Clinic visits are free, but medicines and surgeries are not, says Dr. Beekley.

"Tragedies were many, but hope lived in the camp as well," she wrote.

Hope was seen in the kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and newly built structures: blue tents from UNICEF, green from the People's Republic of China, gold and gray from the Rotary Club of Canada. Water tanks from OXFAM, latrines from Savardoyan (a Sri Lankan humanitarian organization), food and clothing from Christian ministries.

"As a medical team, we were privileged, blessed by our ability to do good and contribute to the recovery," summed up Dr. Beekley.

Her proudest accomplishment, she says, is writing a proposal that Kaiser Permanente send rotating medical teams to Batticaloa to work in the camps for a year and help the hospital there with a plan to develop its infrastructure. Kaiser has agreed to those proposals, she says.

South Bronx prepared Dr. Beekley for Sri Lanka

Dr. Sarah Beekley says her residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York's South Bronx was "good training" for Sri Lanka

"Everyone who knows Jennifer Lopez will know where that is: 20 square miles of burnt-out ghetto. We did with less," she says. "I was given a tremendous amount of responsibility very early in my training."

Now a pediatrician at Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City, Dr. Beekley has followed in the footsteps of her dad and mentor, Dr. Marts Beekley of Atherton, now retired. (Her grandfather was a doctor, too.)

The Beekley family moved to Atherton in 1968 when Marts Beekley became chief of pediatrics for the newly built Redwood City Kaiser facility. Daughter Sarah was in the fourth grade at Las Lomitas School.

She remembers that her mother, Sue Beekley, encouraged cultural and social exchanges, and opened their home to a Vietnamese family as part of the refugee adoption program at Christ Church in Portola Valley.

Sarah graduated from Woodside High School in 1976 and went on to UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.

As a Berkeley student, while working on public health projects in Guatemala and Oxaca under the Los Amigos de las Americas program, she decided to become a doctor.

After graduating from the Albert Einstein Medical School, she lived in New York and London before returning to the Peninsula.

"I'm so lucky," she says. She has two daughters, Anjali, 16, and Lauren, 13, and is married to her high school sweetheart, Michael Hahn, who has three daughters from a previous marriage.

Dr. Beekley estimates she took 1,000 photos in Sri Lanka, from which she created a PowerPoint presentation she has shown to Kaiser staff and at her daughter Anjali's school -- Thacher School in Ojai, California -- which contributed $8,000 for tsunami relief.

The Sri Lankan mission, says Dr. Beekley, was "an amazingly fulfilling experience, despite the tragedy."

-- Marjorie Mader South Bronx prepared Dr. Beekley for Sri Lanka