It’s the summer of 2010 in Karachi and Dr Nuzhat Faruqui, an AKU faculty member, was looking forward to finally learning how to swim. She was making steady progress in overcoming her fear of deep water. That is until events in northern Pakistan compelled her to change her personal and professional plans.
The country-wide flood of 2010, one of Pakistan’s worst natural disasters, affected over 20 million Pakistanis. Images of villages being submerged, survivors trying to swim against strong
Dr Nuzhat with her honorary rank from the Pakistan Navy.
currents and people clinging to branches in a desperate bid to survive, had a profound impact on her.
“Witnessing the destructive power of water put me off swimming. It also awakened a restlessness in me that kept on surfacing when I’d see footage of the havoc caused by the floods,” said Dr Nuzhat, a surgeon with expertise in female urology. She initially channeled her ‘restless’ spirit into raising funds for reconstruction work in the north of the country. But as the floods made their way to the country’s southern province of Sindh, she felt the need to do more.
The scale of the disaster was such that damage control was the need of the hour and anyone with basic medical training could make a difference. “The Pakistan Navy was looking for medical personnel and a few friends and I decided to volunteer,” she says.
Dr Nuzhat applied for a week’s leave from her specialist clinic at AKU’s teaching hospital in Karachi to travel over 100 km to provide basic medical aid to the displaced. She was surprised to see the look of shock on her colleagues’ faces when she shared her plans.
She recalls them saying: “You’ve spent six years training to be a super specialist in your field, why would you want to work as a generalist?”
Back then, she chose to avoid a debate on her career path and instead reminded herself that her decision was a moral imperative rather than a professional choice. It wasn't long before Dr Nuzhat and two other Karachi-based doctors were on the frontlines in districts of Sujawal and Thatta: rural areas typically separated by the River Indus but which had been ‘merged’ and submerged by the floods.
Organised chaos greeted them: Navy helicopters and hovercraft were rushing to save people from drowning. In the distance, she and her colleagues spotted a series of makeshift tents for the displaced and worked swiftly with Pakistan Navy personnel to establish an emergency medical camp. Relief supplies were quickly transported by truck to the spot and Dr Nuzhat and her colleagues quickly improvised a set-up to attend to cases of diarrhea, malnutrition, headaches and dehydration. The mud-stained trio stayed till sunset before heading back to their makeshift accommodation to plan out relief efforts for the next day.
Exposed first hand to the chronic need for basic healthcare and immediate relief services, Dr Nuzhat and company ended up staying two weeks and, more importantly, organised round-the-clock teams for two months of healthcare. She continued to travel to the area every Sunday for another 3 months, which had now grown to a number of ‘tent-cities’ run by the Pakistan Navy that were helping meet the healthcare needs of the displaced.
A year later, the country witnessed another bout of widespread flooding. This time round, Dr Nuzhat was keen to use her experience to launch a wider and more comprehensive set of camps. She and her team of generalists collaborated with the Navy to organise camps across 12 far-flung towns and villages in the creek areas of Sindh spanning a 12-week period. The impact of her work was noticed by a high-ranking Navy officer who asked her to launch regular, non-disaster camps in remote areas. Her response was immediate: “Of course I will.”
Reflecting on the decision, Dr Nuzhat notes that the difference between the mindset of a specialist and a generalist shaped her choice. “A specialist is selective about which cases demand her/his attention whereas a generalist knows s/he can make a difference anywhere,” said Dr Nuzhat. “Maybe that’s why I took on the challenge so readily. I’d come to believe that if I could help, I should help.”
One of the first healthcare camps in 2012 at Chuhar Jamali, one of the many small villages that dot the 1000-km Sindh-Balochistan coastline. While there is a difference in the healthcare services required by a settled population versus a displaced group, Dr Nuzhat notes that generalists can still help address many of challenges caused by poverty and poor access to preventive healthcare.
The efforts have not stopped. Dr Nuzhat, in partnership with the Navy, has conducted between ten and twelve medical camps every year which serve up to 2,000 people a day and offer a range of health awareness and basic healthcare services such as paediatrics, gynaecology, surgery, medicine, dermatology and ophthalmology. She conducts one camp every three to four weeks and is also regularly involved in charity drives and food distribution drives for the underprivileged during public holidays and religious festivals.
Her work has seen her
receive the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (medal of distinction), an award conferred by the president of Pakistan, in 2018 as well as an official letter of commendation from the Chief of Naval Staff for her “selfless devotion to humanitarian causes”. In February 2019, Dr Nuzhat became the first woman and the sixth civilian in the country’s history to receive the honorary rank of Surgeon Commander in the Pakistan Navy. The new role will enable her to expand access to care in her own subspecialty, urinary incontinence and reconstructive surgery. There is a severe shortage of female professionals in her field which means that many women live with the pain of kidney stones, urinary infections or the stigma of bladder problems due to cultural issues that curb them from seeing a male doctor.
She adds that there are widespread misconceptions that such issues are a natural outcome of ageing and is keen to ensure that the specialised care needed for these conditions is within the reach of more patients.
Today, Dr Nuzhat has a different response to queries about her ‘hidden career’. “People often notice that I’m in every disaster area and joke that I must be the cause of the misery! Others remark that I’m away many Sundays and that I should look up the meaning of the word rest.
“Jokes aside, I can’t think of a better way to spend a weekend. The most valuable thing you can give is your time and I feel a sense of peace knowing that I’m playing my part.”
Dr Nuzhat Faruqui is an assistant professor in urology at Aga Khan University and heads the Kidney and Bladder service line at Aga Khan University Hospital.