Features

A month ago, for the first time in 40 years, Barbara Morita walked into a church in El Cerrito and sat quietly in a pew. 

Many regular churchgoers use their time at church to drift off, to forgive, to try to forget. But Morita went in with a specific goal. She prayed for the people she had left behind in New Orleans. 

“There was one point where our convoy had stopped on the freeway and there was this man running after the convoy pushing an old lady in a wheelchair, and we had to keep going,” she says. “We knew that if we stopped and started giving care that we would never make it to the Superdome.” 

Morita is a physician’s assistant at Berkeley High School. When she is not treating the fevers and rashes of the teenage population, she travels to disaster zones with the CAL-6 Disaster Medical Assistance team and provides care for people whose lives have been shredded by natural disaster, war, or terrorism. 

Last month, Morita was in New Orleans. 

On the way to the Superdome, Morita says, her medical team was besieged with people asking for help. Many of the faces are now a blur, but the elderly woman on the side of the highway and her desperate companion made a lasting impression on Morita. 

After working at the Superdome for 20 hours, the medical team left the next day for Baton Rouge and drove back along the same freeway. 

“When we came out, she was there in her wheelchair on the side of the freeway,” Morita says. “She was dead.” 

Morita thought of the woman in church last Sunday. She asked for peace for her, she says, “and for the man who committed suicide, for all of the people who were in pain who did not get help, all of the people who suffered so much.” 

Morita works out of a small, tidy office in the Berkeley High Health Center. She is surrounded by the buzz and urgency created by a building full of teenagers with all their crises, real and imagined. Inside her office, all is calm, her paperwork organized in neat piles on her desk, sun streaming in through the window. In the window, Morita has hung a print her co-workers bought her when she returned from New Orleans. Morita holds it up and traces the black lettering: “It’s the Chinese character for peace and harmony,” she explains. 

Morita is a soft-spoken, gracious woman. She dresses casually, in T-shirts and loose slacks, and wears her long black hair pulled back by two barrettes. Her face is tanned and lined and she wears no makeup. She is still and serious but laughs easily. Above all, she is steady. She has a kind of stillness about her that many people spend years in an ashram trying to achieve. 

During several long conversations about her time in New Orleans, Morita is interrupted many times. Nurses come in and out to get pills and shots. The phone rings, the receptionist interrupts. A girl is here, she has an odd rash, can Morita see her? One afternoon, Morita has just sent a girl in anaphylactic shock to the hospital for treatment. Berkeley High students usually get taken to Children’s Hospital. But the girl’s aunt called, panicked, unable to locate her. 

Morita gets on the phone and starts making calls—Children’s first, then Kaiser, then Alta Bates. She is measured and patient with everyone she deals with, never becoming exasperated, even when she has to repeat the girl’s name multiple times. She finds the girl at Alta Bates. She calls the aunt. More soothing. 

It’s a kind of calm you have to possess, Morita says, if you are going to do the kind of work she does. She has spent much of her adult life treating people in pain. Morita grew up in El Cerrito, did well in school, and enrolled in UC Berkeley for pre-med. But after one year at UC Berkeley, Morita dropped out of pre-med, demonstrated against Vietnam, worked for a farm workers’ union and went to school to become a physician’s assistant. She married, had three girls, and worked for a number of community clinics—Asian Health Services, La Clinica de la Raza and Health Care for the Homeless. She gravitated toward the vulnerable and financially strapped: Mexican janitors with no insurance, immigrant Asian hairdressers with no workplace coverage. 

“My motivation has always been that I do believe that health care is a basic right,” Morita says. “And in the United States it is obviously not, it is a commodity that you purchase. I wanted to do my part to make it accessible to people who cannot otherwise afford it.” 

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in late August, Morita was struck by the images of the suffering and, apparently, the abandoned. She packed her bags, kissed her husband and girls goodbye, and headed south. 

A month later, she is still experiencing the aftershocks. 

When Morita’s team arrived on Aug. 31, they organized themselves on the upper level of an ice arena next to the Superdome that had been converted into a makeshift medical treatment area. 

“When we got there, all the medical tents on the lower level the previous team had been using were flooded and contaminated with fecal matter,” she says. “We couldn’t use the tents, so we set up camp two floors above.” 

Morita says the conditions were appalling and almost impossible to work in. 

“There was no lighting,” she says. “There was no air movement. The toilets were backed up. It was horrible and hot and stuffy. The place was filthy.” 

Morita says the patients she saw were a mixture of critically injured and less serious cases, or, as she calls them, the “walking wounded.” 

“We had a baseline of more minor complaints—people needing medication, diabetes treatment, walk-in clinic type patients,” she says. “And then on top of that we had the National Guard carrying in people that were unconscious, who were having seizures, heart attacks and who had collapsed.” 

Morita also saw patients who had been severely beaten and one man with gunshot wounds. Five women were in various stages of labor. In the 20 hours Morita was there, one baby was born. 

“It had the feel of total chaos,” she says. 

Helicopters stopped removing critically ill patients on the morning of Aug. 31 because snipers were shooting at them, Morita says. Buses did not arrive until Sept. 2, so critically ill patients languished for two days. 

“There were so many patients that needed care that we could not give them,” she says. “I felt helpless and so frustrated and angry that people were stuck in this situation.” 

After working at the Superdome, sleeping about three hours and chewing on half a Power Bar, she headed out to the airport at Baton Rouge. The situation at the airport was much more organized. There was a triage center, and patients were put into one of three areas: red for critically ill, yellow for less urgent, green for minor. 

“There was also what we call an expectant area, which was curtained off. That’s where people were placed who we were expecting to die.” 

A lone minister tended to these patients, offering comfort and last rites. 

“It was a dignified place for them to die,” Morita says. “It was quiet and calm. But it was very sad because they were so alone.” 

Since returning to Berkeley on Sept. 9, she has had insomnia and nightmares and says, “the images come back at strange times.” 

The hardest part, she says, was treating patients, then leaving them and not knowing what happened to them. She still thinks about individual patients. 

One woman had a terrible skin infection: “nasty and extensive and wet and smelly.” Morita had no way to properly clean it and lacked the proper antibiotics to treat it. “She needed lab tests and good wound care and the right medication. I hope she got the right treatment,” she says. 

There was a little boy in sickle cell crisis that they could not care for properly. There was a 12-year-old boy who could barely speak. His mother was concerned for his mental health and would not take him back into the Superdome; she says he had seen dead bodies and violent acts.  

“I can’t take him back in,’ she kept saying. He’s seen too much,” recalls Morita. 

Morita met with the other members of her team a week after returning home to Berkeley. They too were having a hard time adjusting to everyday life again. 

“More guys cried than women,” Morita says. “Many of them cried and said they had felt so helpless down there, unable to help people.” 

One former soldier-turned-medic was having flashbacks of traumatic experiences in combat zones, she says. “A couple of the guys, what they saw and felt brought them back to war experiences. One guy was very vividly re-living being in Somalia.” 

One nurse Morita worked with was unable to return to work for a week after returning. 

But most bounced back fairly quickly, she says: “You keep putting one foot in front of the other. You just keep working.” 

Morita says her experience in New Orleans gave her perspective on what real discomfort and pain are. 

“Since being back, I have a lot less patience for twitter,” she says. “You know, people complaining about ‘it’s too hot in here.’ My philosophy is, if you and the people that you love are alive and well, it was a good day.” 

Contributed photo  

Barbara Morita treats a patient in New Orleans.›