Area Couple to Treat Refugees Near Kosovo

Kukes, Albania, is far from the Improta family home in the hills of Camarillo. The crackle of gunfire on the border is a constant reminder to the refugees in Kukes of where they are--as if anyone needed a reminder. They live in tents, the land washed in mud, but water hard to come by. The Kukes cough, a near-constant, chest-rattling hack that has spread through the camp, reverberates through the night.

But Dr. Robert Improta and his wife of 21 years, Pat, a nurse, are leaving their comfortable house, just days after moving in, to make the trip to Kukes. They will be helicoptered to the camp near the Kosovo border to help treat the masses of refugees who have descended on the overwhelmed town after fleeing the war in Kosovo.

And while the couple admit their grown children are nervous for them, the Improtas feel compelled to do what they can.

“After what you read in the newspaper every day, you can’t live worrying about what will happen to you,” Dr. Improta said. “There are all those refugees living there who don’t have the choice.”

The Improtas, who plan to be gone about three weeks, will join a team of medical professionals from Albania and around the world who are attending to some of the 400,000 Kosovar refugees. They follow a group of UCLA Medical Center health-care workers who departed Thursday night for Tirana, the Albanian capital.

“There’s nothing we could want in comparison to what these people are going through,” said Priscilla Slaven, a Simi Valley resident and UCLA nurse who departed, along with Susan Mortenson, a nurse from Thousand Oaks. “I hope we can go over there and just give a little lift in their spirits.”

Though the numbers of bullet wounds and shrapnel burns are dwindling, Albanian hospitals, already lagging behind the West in medical technology, are overwhelmed by a population that has more than quadrupled with the arrival of more than 100,000 Kosovar refugees.

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This is where volunteers like the Improtas and the UCLA contingent come in, to help bring some stability to a region in turmoil.

“In the first days [of the refugees’ flight] it was just pure pandemonium. Doctors were working 18-hour shifts and there was a lot of burnout,” said Stephen Tomlin, the vice president of international operations at International Medical Corps, the Los Angeles-based relief organization with which the Improtas are working. As the tide of refugees has slowed, doctors have switched their concentration to the nagging problems--respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments, general surgery concerns--that arise in a community of weakened immune systems, heavy rains and poor sanitation.

Besides those maladies, many refugees are still suffering from conditions they had when the war began and regular health care was disrupted, said Dr. Neil Parker of the UCLA contingent.

Dr. Improta is a plastic surgeon with his own practice, the Pacifica Institute of Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery in Camarillo. Though he is a specialist, he has a general surgery background.

This is not his first relief effort and, in some ways, Improta knows what to expect. On a trip he and his wife took to Ecuador nearly two years ago, they found hospitals that reused rubber gloves, had broken windows, lights that didn’t work or were covered in a thick layer of dust.

“The first day the nurses went to the hospital, we just started cleaning the operating room,” said Pat.

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In Ecuador, as he expects in Albania, many people had not received medical care for months. When the Improtas arrived, they found hundreds of people waiting for them in the hospital lobby, holding sick children and seeking care. The Improtas prioritized the need, so the most gravely ill would get treatment first, and methodically moved through the crowd one by one. “You’re working from 7 a.m. to 10 or 11 at night, and you don’t have to spend all your time on paperwork,” Dr. Improta said. “You’re actually helping people.”

But while exhilarating, it is exhausting and, at times, demoralizing work.

“They’ve said things are worse than we think,” Pat said. “They said to come with no expectations of medical care, to come open-minded. It’s just overwhelming, the sheer numbers.”