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The Doctor Who Makes Disaster Calls

Photo from Steve Morris

Steve Morris, physician and nursing instructor at the University of South Florida, has traveled the world as a disaster relief expert.

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By DONNA KOEHN

Published: July 13, 2008

TAMPA - During his 49 years, he's been proud to be, by turns, a University of South Florida nursing instructor, a disaster relief expert, a physician, a registered nurse, a paramedic, a Navy corpsman and a McDonald's burger-flipper, dreaming of becoming the boss.

Just don't call him a humanitarian. Steve Morris insists he isn't that at all.

But consider:

Morris journeyed to his home state of Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, stopping only for quick bites and catnaps as he provided medical care to the destitute.

He drank from a communal bowl of camel's milk — squeezed before his eyes from the less-than-pristine animal — to gain local acceptance while volunteering at a nonprofit agency run by a midwife in Thailand.

He spent more than a year in Saudi Arabia, struggling to get access to families during a United Nations project to ascertain the mental and physical effects of the first Gulf War.

Every weekend, he travels to Mississippi to work in rural hospitals.

But mostly, consider how this nonhumanitarian used some vacation days in May:

A cyclone May 2 ravaged parts of Myanmar, a country of 54 million ruled by a military junta hostile to the United States. Even with a death toll estimated at 22,000, its leaders initially refused outside aid.

Morris received a call from Thai midwife Awing Saawat. She was slipping over the border anyway. Did he want to join her? He jumped on a plane to arrive May 11, well before other rescue groups.

"Awing told me to keep my mouth shut," Morris says, "so no one would question who I was. Being African-American, I could have been from anywhere. I'm patriotic, but this was not a time to wave a flag."

He left his nice wristwatch and camera behind in Thailand, keeping only a scratched watch with no band in his pocket. He didn't dress for a lecture, not that day.

Forbidden to bring medical supplies with them, he and Saawat climbed into a cargo plane, sans seats. Armed guards met them on the ground and would accompany them throughout their stay. From her work and through relatives, Saawat knew some of the locals. It was the only way she was allowed in with her "assistant."

Devastation In Myanmar

Rattling around in the back of a truck on their way to the hospital, the pair watched the devastation through cracks in the slats.

"You know the whiff you can get from road kill? The stench was 20 times worse, both human and animal decay," Morris says. "It was sickening."

He was stunned by the facility when they arrived. "They call it a hospital," he says. "We'd call it a gas station."

Promised medical supplies never arrived. There was no fresh water, no food, no clothing. He found bandages and antiseptic, and got to work. The guards brought the patients, who waited in the oppressive heat for hours in silence, many of them only partially clothed.

Morris didn't know how they were chosen and didn't ask. He knew he and Saawat could be expelled for posing the wrong questions.

"The truck left us there," he says. "When I teach about disaster relief, I always tell my students that it's critical to find a way in and have a way out. I violated my own lesson."

He treated wounds as best he could until the truck returned May 16. Many children — and there were children everywhere, mostly orphaned — had fungal infections.

"The people simply looked beaten," he says. "There was no begging. They just looked as if they had no hope of any help. The feeling was one of total despair. As bad as Katrina was, we could get supplies. We knew we had a way to help the people."

On Morris' second or third or fourth day of this vacation, along came three young boys.

Arriving at the hospital before dawn, they managed to evade the guards. Morris couldn't judge their ages; they could have been 8 or 12.

The three met up after the cyclone, young strangers whose shared misery forged friendships. One had survived by clinging to a tree. All three assumed their parents were dead.

One of the boys was dying.

"They had fashioned a little piece of tin, made it into a sled," Morris says.

The two stronger boys tied ropes to the tin and pulled the sick one along as they begged and scavenged.

"His leg was broken and blackened; he was septic. Even with an amputation and massive doses of antibiotic, he was so far gone we knew he would probably die in a day," he said.

"It was amazing that those two boys had stuck with him."

Morris fed the trio from their supplies. It was all they had to offer. The guards arrived and shooed the boys away. He remembers — likely forever will — the image of the two dragging the third away on the tin sled.

"It was horrible that we couldn't do anything for them," he says. "I tell myself that at least they knew that somebody out there cares."

He Always Gives Credit To Others

Morris agonizes when he can't help and is quick to give credit to others when he does. It's not him, it's local law enforcement after Katrina. It's Awing Saawat. It's his nursing school colleague who takes his classes when disasters call.

It's also all the people along the way who nurtured a boy whose life's goal was to become a manager of a McDonald's. He remembers each person who inspired him on his unusual career path — first becoming a paramedic, then a nurse, and finally, a physician, attending medical school alongside students who called him "Dad."

"He's very unassuming, very low key," says Patricia Burns, dean of the USF nursing school. "But the depth of the man is unbelievable. He has such wisdom and empathy. And his potential for disaster relief work is unbounded. It's something I've never seen before."

He created online nursing courses that stretch the college's accessibility; he won the Dean's Award. Colleagues sing his praises.

But the small-town guy raised by a schoolteacher father seems incapable of putting on airs. He's the kind of person who'd shoot the breeze with the woman who empties his wastebasket one minute, the dean the next.

Former students make it a point to drop by when they visit the campus. Most of the time, they'll find him. But he might be taking vacation days, as he does every year, to volunteer in Thailand.

"It brings me back to reality," says the nonhumanitarian.

And if a cyclone or hurricane threatens, call first. He might already be gone.

Reporter Donna Koehn can be reached at (813) 259-8264 or dkoehn@tampatrib.com.

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