Profits & Passions Dr. Imtiaz Mallick Bringing a ray of hope to the world’s disaster zones BY LYNN WOODS

Profits & Passions
Dr. Imtiaz Mallick
Bringing a ray of hope to the world’s disaster zones
BY LYNN WOODS

It's morning in the second-floor office of Dr. Imtiaz Mallick and the waiting room is filling up with patients. His services are needed and it is clearly time to go, but the experiences he has been talking about have pushed more urgent problems to the fore. He tells of terrible cruelties, the suffering of children. Seven months ago he was in Darfur, the war-torn region of western Sudan where the local inhabitants have been attacked by the Sudanese Army and the nomadic janjaweed, who are fighting rebel groups. Bombs and artillery are destroying the villages. Violent men on horseback ride into the settlements, terrorizing the villagers.

It was just after Christmas. He was in the country with a cache of medical supplies, fulfilling the voluntary sabbatical he has

assigned for himself the last 17 years:

to spend a month of each year in some distressed region of the world, offering his services for free. Since he was a teenager, he has felt compelled to help others less fortunate than himself, volunteering in nursing homes, spending a summer chauffeuring a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease around in his car. In Darfur, however, this was done at considerable risk to himself. He had entered the area from Egypt the region is off limits to Americans traveling in a van. He paid the driver $250 to take him over the border, where he had to pay another $800 to the guards.

Haunting memories

His van was parked under a tree and he was seeing patients when the janjaweed rode into town. People started running. Mallick stood behind a broken wall. The men on horseback started chasing an old woman. The small child with her started to cry. Mallick watched as one of the men brutally murdered the child. He heard the piercing scream. He says the scene “created my own demons. You question your own emotions. Why didn’t you do anything? Why did you value your life more than the kid’s? I wake up in sweats.” Other scenes of horror haunt him. He can’t stop thinking of the dead body of a woman holding a child, both of them shot.

He had tried to help before. Shortly after arriving in the country, he had walked over to two men who were beating another old woman, his hands raised in a conciliatory gesture, and asked them to stop. The next thing he knew he was on the ground, his head hurting, his eye blinded, his body aching. His driver told him he been beaten and passed out. The eye soon healed, but it hurt to breathe. Six weeks later, when he returned to Cairo, he had a medical checkup and discovered two ribs had been broken. How was he able to treat 300 patients and travel the countryside in that kind of condition? “You get a surge of adrenaline. Nature takes over when you have to do what’s necessary to help.”

He walks over to a shelf and takes down the reward he received from the state Legislature last May, which cites “outstanding heroic service to the refugees of Darfur.” The tragedy of Darfur, he adds, is made possible by world apathy. In Darfur, people “have no option, no resources.” While he’s encountered terrible suffering on other trips, “Darfur was my worst nightmare because it is a man-made disaster.”

‘It’s redeeming’

Mallick, a resident of LeGrange who besides maintaining his private practice in Fishkill is chief of medicine at Vassar Brothers Medical Center and president of the Dutchess County Medical Society, has also visited Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia and New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In 2005, he and his wife traveled to the Himalayas in Pakistan after the deadly earthquake. They chose to visit a remote area and were flown in by Oxfam, the relief organization, accompanied by 250 tents and 16 suitcases and boxes of medical supplies. It was bitterly cold, and for three days they subsisted on power bars, until a group of soldiers arrived with food. The town had been leveled and people were walking around in shock.

Working from a tent, with stones serving as chairs, Mallick treated a 4-year-old boy with a broken arm who had lost his entire family, except for his young sister. He wished he had something to give to the child, but all “I could offer him were some empty vials,” which became the boy’s toys. The boy, however, found something to give him. “When we were ready to leave, the kid came over and gave me three walnuts.”

Aid workers had poured into the cities, but there were none in the area chosen by the Mallicks.

Mallick’s treatment was probably critical in saving many in the first days of the disaster, when no other help was available. But when he got back to America, “somebody said, ‘You went there and so what?’” Mallick had an answer. “As a human being it’s redeeming for your own humanity to be able to assist in whatever way you can. It may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s a drop I could do.”

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