VENTURA : Brain Surgeon Recalls Bosnia Relief Mission

Ventura brain surgeon Melvin Cheatham remembers driving along darkened streets with the images of men hunting for firewood illuminated by dim, passing headlights.

“When they go out in the daytime, they’re subject to sniper fire,” Cheatham said now, weeks removed from war-torn central Bosnia, where he led a team of medical professionals on a voluntary relief mission.

He remembers the sound of artillery and mortar shells exploding only a few hundred yards from the cramped and lacking emergency room where he worked in the Croatian hamlet of Novi Bila.

Cheatham still feels the snug fit of the flak jacket he was told to wear, and the clamp of the bullet-proof helmet strapped atop his head as he was transported in an old ambulance to yet another makeshift operating room.

“There are just incredible numbers of war casualties,” Cheatham said from his fourth-floor Ventura office.

In Bosnia, “a lot of the head-injured patients die because of the severity of the injury or because there’s no one to perform the surgery,” he said.

A member of the board of directors of Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian group that organizes relief missions to war-torn regions around the globe, Cheatham and his team treated hundreds of patients and performed 15 operations over the two weeks they spent in Bosnia.

“They’ve turned a Catholic church into a hospital serving 90 patients,” Cheatham said of his desperate medical counterparts. “The pews are facing each other to make beds for their patients, and the operating room is downstairs in the basement, underneath the altar.”

He is no stranger to such suffering and bare-bones medical care. Since visiting Africa on a photographic safari 10 years ago, Cheatham and his wife, Sylvia, have made dozens of relief missions on four continents.

“There’s nothing political about any of the trips,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that people who are sick, starving . . . they’re the same all over the place.”

Cheatham said the promise of another frigid Bosnian winter will wreak even greater desperation on the people who live there. Before spring, 400,000 more people will die of starvation or weather-related disease, he said.

Samaritan’s Purse, which officials said has already sent more than $6 million in aid to the Yugoslav republics, is sponsoring “Operation Christmas Child,” an effort to provide the region’s children with holiday gifts.

To make a donation or help the relief agency in other ways, contact Samaritan’s Purse at (704) 262-1980.