Somewhere in the middle of East and West is the town of Nukus.
Located in the arid northwest corner of Uzbekistan, the Central Asian town reported a population of 230,000 residents in 2014.
“I always felt I was in the middle of time – not modern, not ancient, not exotic, not Eastern and not Western,” says the widely travelled Calvin White, who worked there with Médecins San Frontières (MSF) in 2011.
They are a people struggling with a terrible epidemic of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis.
White has a masters in counselling psychology and 20 years of experience in the school district and private practice, working with clients who had a wide range of issues, from sexual and physical abuse and various other traumas.
Previously unaware mental health was part of the organization’s service, White applied to work with MSF because of his respect for the organization’s direct action in terms of humanitarian aid.
“They are literally working with the immediate, personal well-being of people in need all over the world,” he says. “That direct contact is what made me really excited to work with them.”
Because of his intense work with teens, White says he was fully prepared to take up the challenge of working with seriously ill individuals.
“They are going through the same issues as Canadians – sexual abuse, early trauma, living with alcoholism, domestic violence and with suicidal thoughts,” he says. “That general seed was inside them – that when push came to shove, they didn’t deserve to live.”
Unlike the previous supervisor who remained in the administrative office most of the time, White spent the first six months of his term with a caseload in order to get to know the TB patients and what this terrible disease was doing.
He counselled patients in two main hospitals and several clinics and, by the end of his term, was supervising a team of 25 counsellors in four towns.
“It touched my heart that I was able to be so intimate with them and be with them as they were trying not to die; being included in their deepest truth and being accepted by them,” he says.
TB destroys the lungs, making breathing increasingly difficult. And the multi drug-resistant type doesn’t respond well to drugs that haven’t been updated for many years because TB has been all but eradicated in the West.
“The only chance they have is to take a cocktail of 1950s and 1960s drugs – 20 pills a day and an injection for a period of two years.”
White says the side-effects are debilitating and range from nausea, aching joints, headache for two or three hours after taking medication and, for some others, tinnitus, hearing loss, liver and kidney damage and psychotic thoughts.
The two-year drug regime begins with a six-month stay in hospital, followed by visits to a clinic six days a week for the drug cocktail. Stopping the treatment early means the disease will return with an increased resistance to drugs.
“It was a war to keep everyone on the drugs so they’d live, but also so they wouldn’t infect other people,” says White. “There was a lot of pressure on us counsellors to make the difference.”
While some did recover, White says that during his time in Nukus and since his return home, 30 of the patients he knew had died and many were ones he had counselled and held in his arms.
White says that being so far from home and in an alien culture, forced him to open up, be vulnerable and allow the experience to wash through him.
“I just had to accept that this is the journey of life, people do die and we’re all going to die,” he says. “It was never a burden, it was emotional, and when it was emotional, it was both joyful and sad.”
White has written about what he calls his intimate adventure of beauty, love and death in a 300-plus page book – Letters From the Land of Fear.
On Thursday, April 16, White will give a presentation with slides at 7 p.m. in room 134 of Okanagan College Salmon Arm.
This presentation will be both emotionally engaging and thought-provoking as White discusses his book and explores intimacy, life’s purpose and how to approach suffering and sadness.