Dr Carolyn De Marco didn’t really mean to go to Aceh.

Harvest, a Canadian midwife who had already served at the Bumi Sehat Clinic in Bali, visited Carolyn in rural British Columbia and urged her to join the medical team. The doctor rather flippantly agreed. Then a journalist misquoted her and wrote that she was on her way to the tsunami zone. Rather reluctantly, Carolyn made her way to Bali with the intention of taking over the Bumi Sehat Clinic for a few weeks. The next thing she knew she was in a devastated village in Aceh, treating patients in a bamboo clinic.

"I was hesitant to go,” she admits now. “I wasn’t sure I could deal with the grief. But it was absolutely the right thing to do.”

Carolyn returned radiant from almost a month in Aceh. In her 30 years of practice she found the work at the clinic particularly rewarding. As a pioneer of natural medicines she treated her Acehnese patients with a combination of conventional medications and herbal tinctures, essential oils, Chinese herbs, homeopathy, salt water soaks, castor oil packs and other therapies. The Acehnese were very open to this approach.

“Many of the patients we saw still carried deep grief, manifesting as headache, coughs, skin problems and insomnia. The stories were overwhelming. We saw people who could only sleep 30 minutes at a time, people with blood pressure over the top of the scale, people whose children had been torn from their arms by the sea. We treated them with homeopathic grief remedies and Hope and Joy oils from Young Living Essential Oils. We also used a Trauma Card which has a geometric pattern that helps reprogram grief, developed and donated by the Gentle Wind Project. The patients improved visibly and said they felt stronger after these treatments.”

Working with Harvest and Eric, her translator, Carolyn saw between 40 and 60 patients every day at the clinic or in surrounding villages. The warmth, courage and resilience of the people was impressive, as was their openness to the strangers who had come to treat them.

Working conditions were challenging with heavy rains, earth tremors and lack of infrastructure. Even after hot days of intense work, sleep didn’t come easily for volunteers living in close quarters with thin walls. Then on the evening of March 28, a second massive earthquake of over 8 struck the coast. For eight long minutes the earth rolled, giving the team a taste of the terror that had touched the survivors in Samatiga. Mercifully, no tsunami followed this quake.

Given her initial reluctance to step into the environment of post-tsunami Aceh, Carolyn is already planning her next trip to the clinic at Samatiga. “The experience was just the opposite of what I expected it to be. The people were so inspiring. It was much more about life than death, hope than despair. Working at the clinic in Samatiga is one of the most worthwhile things I have ever done.”