AN KHODABAKHSH DOESN’T REQUIRE a whole lot of sleep. It’s perfectly
normal, in fact, for the 33-year-old doctor to work a double shift bandaging up drunks and pulling bullets from teenagers in the emergency
room of UCLA’s Harbor Medical Center before driving home, scarfing
down some takeout, and setting the alarm to wake up five hours later
and do it all over again. Every other month or so, Khodabakhsh changes
the routine: Instead of going home, he drives to the airport, hops a redeye to Miami, transfers to Port-au-Prince, and heads directly to some
ill-lit clinic in some dusty Haitian town. But one morning last December, stepping out into the chaos and glare of Toussaint Louverture Airport, he was told by his supervisor that he would be skipping the clinic
and traveling instead to the city of Les Cayes. The country’s nascent
cholera epidemic had begun to migrate south, and it was moving fast. D
Arriving at the coastal city’s main hospital, Khodabakhsh didn’t
know where to look first. The makeshift Cholera Treatment Center consisted of two tents erected in a low-lying area, and the previous night’s
rainwater was pooled around the legs of its few rickety cots. Bedless
patients slumped against a short concrete wall running the length of
the tents, awaiting the handful of doctors and nurses wading through
the water. The pharmacy and triage areas were
flooded, drums of liquid cholera waste were accumulating in the back, and the tents were sweltering—not
exactly ideal conditions for victims of a disease that
kills by draining the body of fluids.
Within 72 hours of his arrival, Khodabakhsh and
his Haitian colleagues had treated more than 200
patients in that cramped space. Bet ween scrambling
to find more cots and cut holes in them (a plastic
bucket placed beneath each would catch the bodily
waste), meeting with community leaders who had
ridden down from the hills on donkeys for lessons in
hand-washing and administration of oral-rehydration
solutions, and hounding UNICEF for additional sup-
plies, Khodabakhsh was sleeping about four hours
a night. Looking back, he says today, that was prob-
ably the sanest part of that particular stint with Inter-
national Medical Corps (IMC), the nongovernmental
organization with which he regularly works. The next
few days involved barricading himself in a hotel room
while outside an angry mob fired shots in response to unhappy election
results; being evacuated by machine-gun-wielding UN soldiers; travel-
ing the streets in what felt like slow motion as the military vehicle he
was in navigated around dozens of flaming tires; and eventually being
helicoptered back to the capital.
