Tsunami relief workers prepare for departure

Justin Blomsness/Frontiersman reporter

On a recent evening at the Crossroads Community Church in Wasilla, hunting guide Mark Sebens emerged from a pile of cardboard boxes, plastic containers and backpacks holding two plastic buckets, and said he was ready to go to Sri Lanka.

Sebens carried lots of equipment - including a drill, a Sawsall and replacement bits and blades for both tools, two buckets stuffed with gauze, syringes, antibiotics and carpenter nails - pretty much anything Sebens could fit inside a laundry soap bucket that didn't weigh too much.

Slinging a camouflage backpack off his shoulders, Sebens placed it on a bathroom scale to make sure the filled pack complied with weight restrictions. In a few hours, a Korean Air jetliner would take him far from his home and family in Alaska to a place of death and suffering. The things Sebens carried and the things he left behind would make all the difference in the world.

The dial on the scale spun -140, 150, 170 pounds.

"Still too much," Sebens muttered, unzipping his backpack.

That day, Sebens was joined by Wade and Heather Erickson, Geoff Barry, Elowyn Smith, Roger Hughes, Jon Clark, Khrysten Smith, Rosie Buben and Don Cunningham, a group of 11 Alaska tsunami relief workers who jokingly referred to themselves as "Team Cool Guy USA."

The group is composed of doctors, nurses, physician assistants and handymen like Sebens. Their mission is to help the victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami that swept across much of coastal Asia, killing an estimated 150,000 people. The group's sponsor is Crossroads Community Church, a Mat-Su congregation led by pastor Phil Markwardt.

Markwardt said the logistics - the way the team and supplies have come together so quickly - is "a small miracle in itself." And Markwardt, a missionary who is traveling to Africa later this year, knows what he is talking about.

But if the team has a guardian angel, it is Kathy Conn, the church's integration director. She made the phone calls, coordinated flights and lined up the contributions to make the mission possible.

Conn was responsible for members of the team getting their passports in just four days. Thanks to Conn, the Willow post office opened on New Year's Day and packages containing passport information went Goldstreak to Seattle.

A divine intervention? Conn thinks so.

Proof can also be found in the contributions the tsunami relief workers carried with them to Sri Lanka - roughly 770 pounds of gear, most of it food and medical supplies from local businesses and organizations.

Conn says the list of contributors is "too numerous to mention," but major donors include Capstone Family Medical Clinic, Valley Hospital, Alaska Medical Missions, The James Project, Haines Hospital, Church on the Rock, Mat-Su Evangelical and the Anchorage Wesleyan church, to name a few.

For the flight over, each worker was allowed to carry two bags each, weighing 70 pounds. The church also paid for the airline to deliver eight additional bags. Local businesses and parishioners helped pick up the tab.

This isn't vacation packing. The task of tsunami relief workers is to treat as many people as possible in a chaos- and disease-ridden region without getting sick or injured themselves. Obviously, medical supplies and emergency gear are the most valuable commodities, so workers sought to make room for supplies by paring their personal items to a minimum.

They swapped socks for bandages, streamlined packages by tearing off their edges, discarded novels and magazines from their luggage and replaced them with splints and gauze and batteries and bottles of aspirin.

"You'd be surprised at how much aspirin you use," said Wade Erickson, a doctor, as he ripped apart a cardboard Zithromax box.

One young doctor listed his gear: "I've got hundreds of oral antibiotics, IV fluid, suture material, a lot of over-the-counter stuff, Tylenol, Ibuprofen. I've got a couple of changes of clothes, one book for the long flight over, some simple food items. I had a little MP-3 player, but I chucked it for some beta blockers… ."

The doctor paused to look around the church.

"Am I forgetting anything important?" he asked.

"A chain saw," Sebens joked.

Around 11 p.m., when most people are hitting the pillow, the workers were making last-minute preparations. To an outsider, the first impressions suggest this is some kind of disaster zone itself rather than a rescue mission, with belongings ripped from backpacks and discarded, the buzz of adrenaline, a howl of confusion and tired-looking people lining up to get inoculations for cholera, dengue fever, polio and malaria - most of them diseases from which the U.S. freed itself long ago.

One of the team's handymen stood in a corner looking calm despite the frantic packing of teammates. His green duffel bag was ready to go and his name stenciled in white ink on its side. In fact, it's right where he wrote it in 1986 while attending boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Today, Donald Cunningham is stationed at Elmendorf Command Post - he is currently on leave.

"So I'm used to this type of packing," Cunningham said.

Is Cunningham excited?

"More than anything," he replied, "but I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing."

Despite the danger, or perhaps because of it, excitement was apparent everywhere, and nobody tried to deny it. The repeated question of "Why are you going to Sri Lanka?" drew the same reply.

"Because God told me to go," Cunningham said. "That's why I'm so excited."

"I just have this feeling God wants me to go," Elowyn Smith echoed.

Smith, 35, a pediatrician at Providence Alaska Medical Center, was trying to steel herself, she said, for all the pain and suffering she knows she will witness. Smith kept packing bottles of children's Tylenol and pulling clothes out of her bags.

"I'm a little afraid," she said, when asked about the children. "But this is what I do."

For her part, Smith sees the rescue mission as a refreshing shift from all of the recent images splashed across the media of Americans gearing up to go to war in foreign countries. Her teammates agreed.

One of the volunteers, Christine Rawls, 21, wandered past, clutching bags of medications. A librarian during the school year and a day-care worker the rest of the time, Rawls said she was sitting at home with her boyfriend, Jeremiah Grantham, when his phone rang.

It was Conn, asking if Grantham could lend a hand. Rawls told him she was coming along. And she's glad she did.

"This is the funnest thing I've ever done with a boyfriend," Rawls said, sorting through the medicines and stuffing bags. "I wish I was going with them."

Nothing could keep Wade Erickson home. A doctor in his mid-thirties, Erickson is the obvious team leader. With a coach's eye, he watched the workers pack and handed out encouragement and advice like a human vending machine.

"Who needs hep-A shots?" he said. "I know three people here who still need to get their IGG. What is IGG? It's a kind of fast-acting hepatitis vaccine. I don't want to see anyone getting sick."

Erickson's wife is Heather, an optometrist who works alongside Wade at Capstone Family Medical Clinic. Heather was in charge of administering inoculations to the team members, but her flustered manner conveyed she wasn't accustomed to poking people with needles in her daily practice.

When asked when she learned to give shots, Heather said, "About 10 minutes ago. But I'm an M.D., so make sure you call me Dr. Erickson."

When friends laughed at her indignation, she jabbed them with the needle.

Heather tried to remind everyone to get inoculated for polio, tetanus, hepatitis-A, influenza. The names of people who received their shots were carefully checked off on a yellow tablet of paper. Or not.

"If you're lying, you're dying," she says.

Butch Killian sidled up and removed his money belt to get his shots.

Killian joked that he felt like a human pincushion, but as an emergency medical technician who spent time in Vietnam as a medic, Killian knows inoculation against disease is no laughing matter. In Sri Lanka, the team members can expect to encounter dead bodies in the streets, as well as airborne and waterborne diseases.

If the Crossroads Community Church relief team is composed of Christian soldiers, Sri Lanka is their war zone.

As the flight time drew near, the workers grow more solemn. The scene brought to mind war movies from the 1980s. The genre always featured steel-jawed commandos smearing on face paint, shouldering machine guns and clipping on grenades, knives and ammo belts as synthesizers blared a pseudo-martial beat.

Most of the workers were probably not thinking about war as they painstakingly packed and reorganized their gear, though one young man in a military haircut paused to look around and offer this observation: "This feels a lot like getting ready to go on deployment."

Maybe so, but to Sebens, it almost seemed like another day on the job as a guide, perhaps gearing up to go hunting in Haines. Almost.

"I don't know what to expect to see over there," Sebens said. "It doesn't bother me, though. I've got a job to do. I told the docs, look, I don't have medical training. But I can fix just about anything. I figure half of the time I'll be fixing broken things over there. And the other half fixing our gear, keeping these guys going."

Sebens does bring vital know-how and manpower to the table. When the portable generators break down, he'll pull out his wrenches. And when worse comes to worse, he'll resort to the old Alaska fix-all: A roll of duct tape - lots of rolls of duct tape.

"Duct tape and baling wire," Sebens said, "never leave home without it."

Contact Justin Blomsness at justin.blomness@frontiersman.com