Paula White
Northern News Services

INUVIK (May 28/99) - Dr. Ann Duggan's most vivid memory of the refugee camps in Macedonia isn't of sobbing women and children, gaunt with exhaustion and hunger.

It is of walking between the tents in the camp and seeing dozens of children's shoes, caked with mud, piled outside them.

"And I'm just thinking, these poor mothers trying to keep their children clean. There's no running water. There's no hot water. People have plastic water bottles...trying to heat them over a little fire and the plastic all melting and they're desperately trying to get warm water to clean their kids."

Duggan said that while there are times when the men and women of Kosovo do openly grieve for all they have lost, for the most part, they simply try to restore some semblance of normality to their lives, gathering water to do laundry or attending health clinics.

Duggan is a physician who volunteers with Doctors Without Borders, the largest medical, non-governmental organization in the world. She is originally from St. John's, Nfld., but is based in Halifax, N.S. In actual fact though, she is only in Halifax about three months of the year. She spends the rest of the time travelling around the world.

"I was actually working in northern Sudan on a meningitis project (in March and April)," Duggan explained. "Then they pulled me out of there to go to Macedonia for 10 days to help with the set-up of the camps."

As part of volunteering with Doctors Without Borders, Duggan also fills in for physicians while they're on vacation. This is the reason she has been in Inuvik since the beginning of May. Duggan has been to Inuvik on seven previous occasions.

"It's nice to come back here," she said. "It's nice coming back to a place where I know most of the people in town. It's a little bit like coming home in a way."

Duggan's last visit to Inuvik was in October, after which she headed to El Salvador for a month to help the victims of Hurricane Mitch. From El Salvador, she went to Sierre Leone, where there is a civil war, for two months and then on to Sudan for the meningitis outbreak. There she helped with the vaccination of two million people. Does she mind all the travelling?

"It's very rewarding," she said. "I love that I'm from Canada...we're just so fortunate here. We really have absolutely everything."

While in Macedonia, Duggan said she didn't do much hands-on work with the refugees. Her role was to help set up the health-care system within three camps. She said she has been volunteering so long that she is more involved with the policy and planning aspect than the actual medical treatment of the refugees.

"It's more looking at the camps and setting priorities for the coming six months -- what we had to do to ensure adequate health services for the refugees that were coming in."

For example, Duggan said she helped set up a diabetes clinic, pre-natal care programs for pregnant women and vaccination clinics for children. Aside from the physical health programs, however, Duggan said it is just as important to set up mental health programs.

"If you got all of Halifax to get up and walk to Maine...what sort of health issues would be there when people got there? Well, most people would just be exhausted but they would be OK.

"But everybody with chronic medical conditions like an insulin-dependent diabetic or somebody on dialysis are going to not have had their treatment for two weeks and you need to deal with them. But mostly people are just completely stressed about having lost everything...their bank accounts, their houses, their kid's favourite toy."

In Macedonia, Duggan worked with a team of 45 people, two of whom were fellow Canadians. Duggan said she frequently comes across Canadians in her travels.

"It's such a small world. (One of the women) I was working with in Sudan, whose name is Jane Little, was a nurse in (Fort) McPherson for two years."

Duggan said although all the world's attention right now is on Kosovo and the refugees there, she pointed out there are hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the world with absolutely nothing, not even hope.

"Those (Kosovar) refugees are being flown, all expenses paid, to Canada," she said. "It's a very nice thing the Canadian government is doing, but you also have to look at (the fact that) there are a lot of refugees in the world that it's not being done for."

Duggan leaves Inuvik on May 29. She has requested to go back to Macedonia.