For immediate release: Sept. 4, 2007
GALVESTON, Texas - For some people, an ideal vacation might be going to a secluded island and just watching the waves lap the shore. For others, it might be a trip to Paris in the spring or a visit to New England to see the colorful fall foliage.

And then there's Dr. Iftikhar Ali. His vacations of late have been to parts of the world plagued with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and abject poverty. And he's loved every minute of it.

Ali, a physician in the emergency room at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, this year traveled to Ghana as part of a team of doctors providing care to people in great need.

In the last three years, Ali also has gone to Kashmir, Guyana, Peru and New Orleans. The expeditions have been extraordinary opportunities from which he has derived great personal and professional satisfaction.

"When I go to these places, my arms are free and my heart's open and I can just do a lot more with a lot less," Ali said.

Ali's recent medical excursions can be traced to December 2004 when he actually was planning a so-called real vacation. It was to be a hiking trip to Thailand with a photojournalist friend. But then an earthquake in the Indian Ocean that spawned a tsunami changed all his plans. He cancelled his trip to Thailand and made arrangements through Humanity First to go to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims.

"But when I was at the plane, just getting ready to board they said the Indonesian government said it had too many physicians," he said. "They didn't want any more physicians. I was disappointed because I had talked myself into going. I was nervous but excited."

His predicament didn't last long as Humanity First arranged for Ali to go to Guyana where huge amounts of rainfall had flooded large sections of the small South American country.

The floods there were the worst in more than 100 years.

"From December 25th to January 25th, they got close to 30 feet of rain," Ali said, noting that, for many poor residents along the coast, a bathroom had been a hole in the ground. The severe flooding created very unsanitary conditions.

"It was like standing in your toilet bowl for weeks," Ali said, adding that he treated a lot of the flood victims for leptospirosis, a disease transmitted by rats through their urine. Medical supplies were difficult to acquire at first but the Guyanese government soon came through and provided ample supplies, he said.

"It was a life-changing experience for me," Ali said. The trip to Guyana served to reinvigorate and renew his commitment to the medical profession. "I guess I'm a religious person and that's actually why I became a physician - to help people."

He said that it was "really refreshing to see a complete stranger, give them some medicine and just shake their hand and say good luck and I'll be at this place tomorrow if you need me."

Ali was so moved by his experience in Guyana that he returned a few weeks later to help some more. It was at about that time that his father told him about a friend who had a daughter in the medical field who also was interested in medical missions.

He decided to send an e-mail to Tayyeba Ahmad, a medical student at Emory University in Atlanta. "We both hit it off immediately. We are still amazed at how well we hit it off."  They got along so well that he proposed within a week and were married about a year later.

Meanwhile, 2005 was full of disasters. When Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans Ali decided he had to go there to help. "If I can go to another hemisphere and help strangers, why can't I help my neighbors," he said about his decision to help.

He was assigned to work in Gonzalez, La., where he helped create a distribution network for medical supplies and essentials such as diapers.

He would have stayed longer in Louisiana but by then Hurricane Rita was threatening the Texas coast and Ali came back to UTMB.

But he was soon on his way to another disaster.  In October 2005, he went to his parents' homeland of Pakistan to help earthquake victims in Kashmir. His wife-to-be, Tayyeba, helped arrange for supplies and shelters in Kashmir. And just like on his other medical trips, Ali and his colleagues saw hundreds of patients each day.

The couple's wedding was in January 2006. So what did they do on their honeymoon?

"We actually did a mission trip for our honeymoon," Ali said, explaining that through the Care Free Foundation, he and his new bride helped a group of surgeons in Peru, a country that has one of the highest rates of blindness in the Americas.

The honeymoon part of the trip included three days to visit Machu Picchu. 

Tayyeba, who just finished medical school at Emory University, is conducting research on diabetic retinopathy at the Medical College of Georgia. She eventually wants to become an ophthalmologist. She is organizing an ophthalmologic mission through Humanity First to Peru in March 2008.

On his most recent trip to Ghana, Ali was reunited with some of the doctors that he had met in Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina.

In Ghana, the doctors found inadequate lighting conditions for surgery and often relied on sunlight augmented by headlamps.

"The surgical procedures were performed under less than ideal circumstances," Ali said, alluding to the poor lighting, hot operating rooms with no air conditioning and the lack of enough sterile equipment and gowns. "Despite these limitations the patients did quite well and we were all deeply satisfied."

Just after returning from Ghana, Ali in August was again packing his bags. His destination this time would be Peru where a powerful earthquake had killed hundreds of people. But in the end, he and others decided that the situation was too dangerous since hundreds of inmates who had escaped from a prison were still at large.

So back in Galveston, Ali keeps a busy pace tending to patients, traveling to Georgia to visit Tayyeba and keeping track of his family in Houston.

And while Ali said that he enjoyed the challenges of the emergency room at UTMB, he readily conceded that he's looking forward to his next medical mission.

"Whenever I watch the news, it's with the thought I may need to go somewhere else," Ali said. "The only thing that's stopping me is that I'm running out of vacation time."
The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
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