Alumni News

UI alum aids quake victims
By Laura Thompson

Reprinted with permission of the The Daily Iowan © 2005

As soon as the earth would start to rattle, hundreds of South Asia earthquake victims would run from their hospital beds and into the night. They feared the building would become a concrete avalanche, and, like many of their family members, they would be buried alive.

Others already knew what it was like to be trapped beneath the rubble.

Dr. Rafat Jan, a UI alumna who led a nursing team in Kashmir after the quake, said it was all she could do to persuade patients to return to the hospital following an aftershock from the October 8 quake, which has killed more than 70,000.

“Most wouldn’t come inside until it got cold,” she said. “That whole day, we were outside providing care in the field.”

Based at a government hospital in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, Jan said she treated as many as 400 patients, who filled beds both inside and outside the hospital. Jan, who completed her PhD in nursing informatics at the UI in June 2004, led a team of nurses from Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, where she is the director of the bachelor of nursing program.

The Pakistan Nursing Council invited the all-female team to Islamabad before dispatching it to Kashmir for 14 days, beginning on October 14.“It was chaos,” Jan said. “When I reached there [Muzaffarabad], the government hospital was the only building that was intact.”

She put the team to work immediately, creating a duty schedule with shifts lasting 14 hours. For five days, the nurses worked without running water, and for three days, there was no electricity. At night, the group cared for patients by candlelight, and when giving injections, they would use a camera flash for additional light, Jan said.

While the nurses mostly focused on pain management, by the third day, Jan started engaging patients in spiritual healing to help them cope with the aftershocks and emotional pain.

“I never saw patients who had one death in their families,” she said. “There were numerous deaths.” She used simple prayers to move the patients from survival mode into coping and healing. She told them, “If we move calmly, then the earth will move calmly too.”

After three days of spiritual care, another 5.7-magnitute aftershock hit - this time the patients remained indoors, coping through prayer. “It was amazing,” Jan said. “I could not expect that kind of outcome in six days.”

But there were also painful moments, which, she said, tested her emotional strength, moments when she spoke to adolescent girls who lost their entire families and when she cradled and cared for motherless newborns.

“Many came from the rubble,” she said. “I got two or three babies, one-month-old babies, who were in their mothers’ laps. The mothers died ... and nothing happened to the babies.”

On October 31, Jan returned to Karachi “physically and emotionally” exhausted, but she has already started planning for another team to assist a different government hospital in disaster-management training. Despite spending most of her days practicing theoretical nursing, Jan said, she wanted to put her skills into practice at a time when they were needed most.

“I got the highest education from the best part of the world,” she said. “People thought, I have a PhD, I can’t be on the ground. I would feel guilty if I wouldn’t have been there.”