A North-East doctor’s personal connections to Nepal meant his mercy mission to help quake-hit victims was never in doubt. Stuart Arnold reports

WITHIN days of arriving in Nepal following a major earthquake which killed thousands, Dr Mike Lavender was helping to make headlines of his own.

A video he shot of panicked locals massing on the street in the capital Kathmandu during a second quake and posted on social networking website Twitter was picked up by international media and aired on 24 hour news channels. The experience that day has stayed with him.

“The video clip doesn’t really quite match what it felt like,” he says. You are standing in the middle of the road, but everything is moving like it is in a boat. It’s a psychological thing, all your pre-conceived ideas of steady, solid ground – it suddenly becomes liquid. You also get this low grumbling sound underneath. It’s just the most terrifying thing.”

Dr Lavender, 61, who is a consultant in public health with Durham County Council and lives in Morpeth, Northumberland, has a long association with Nepal and describes its inhabitants as “wonderful people” with an incredible capacity to overcome adversity. His links to the country began when he met wife Sue, a teacher, who was taken by her father, a GP, to Nepal as a child.

“It runs in the family,” he says. “As a junior doctor I decided before our kids were too old to spend some time in Nepal. The original plan was to go for a year, but we ended staying eight years.”

The father of four first lived and worked in Nepal between 1984 and 1992, later returning with his wife in 2007 for another two years. His children include a daughter, 28 year-old Sangita, who was adopted from an orphanage in Kathmandu.

Seeing the unfolding disaster in Nepal, he felt he had to act. Dr Lavender applied to the British Government to join the official aid programme. But after a week and hearing no news, he jumped on a plane and flew out to Nepal under his own steam.

“My employer was very supportive, clearing my diary and getting my responsibilities dealt with at very short notice,” he says. “Everybody realised once they saw the news footage that Nepal needed help and as someone with a medical degree and can speak Nepali it made sense that I should go and do what I could.”

Having worked in the past in Nepal as a leprosy surgeon and spent two years working with charity Save the Children, Dr Lavender made contact with some of the organisations he was already familiar with. One of those included ChildReach Nepal headed up by Dr Tshering Lama, a former graduate of Northumbria University.

It has turned its education programme into a relief programme for remote areas in Nepal following the two devastating quakes which recently struck the country. Dr Lavender joined ChildReach as a volunteer and after a short stay in Kathmandu was quickly heading up into the mountains.

“It was a case of taking what we had supplies-wise and travelling to one of the worst affected areas, the Sindupalchok district, an eight hour drive from Kathmandu and a pretty tough off-road journey,” he says. “Some of the villages had been completely destroyed so we took materials such as tents, tarpaulins, big canisters of water and food supplies. We took a lot of first aid and medical stuff because we knew there would be lots of injuries. There were also children with chest infections, gastroenteritis, dysentery, a mix really.”

The volunteers set up a clinic under a tarpaulin constructed with bamboo poles and treated a variety of injuries. Dr Lavender also joined emergency services in Khokana, in the Kathmandu Valley, during his stay.

“They were still going into houses to help recover bodies buried under rubble and recover goods,” he says. They were incredibly brave and hardly had any safety equipment at all.”

The emotional impact of what he saw and experienced in Nepal was huge. Physically it was also very demanding and took its toll.

“It is probably the most difficult thing I have ever done – the terror in the eyes of the young kids I saw will stay with me,” Dr Lavender says. “It was overwhelming to see people who had lost loved ones and had their homes completely wrecked, but yet still remain incredibly generous and hospitable.”

He says he is privileged that he can go and help directly, but that people should not estimate the power of donations towards a country which has a historic connection to Britain through the Gurkhas.

“A pound goes a long way in Nepal,” he says. “And yes I can hear people saying we have enough problems in County Durham and that is entirely right. Comparatively speaking, however, it is about giving a little bit of what we have in order to support people so much worse off than ourselves.”

For more information about ChildReach Nepal visit www.childreachnp.org