Northwest reaching out to help victims

EVERETT — A week ago, Charlie Hargrove couldn’t have gone to Sri Lanka: Even if he knew where it was, he didn’t have a passport to get there.

This weekend, though, the Lake Stevens man was on his way, moved by scenes of the devastation wreaked by the Indian Ocean tsunamis.

He has joined many Northwest residents doing whatever they can to help survivors of the disaster, which may have killed as many as 150,000 people.

Volunteers include people folding donated clothing in World Concern’s Lynnwood warehouse; companies such as Microsoft Corp., which has pledged $3.5 million; and doctors and paramedics volunteering with organizations such as Tigard, Ore.-based Northwest Medical Teams.

Hargrove doesn’t speak a foreign language, only “English and pig Latin,” he told The Herald of Everett. He doesn’t have formal medical or disaster training.

With the help of his wife and daughter, he managed in four days to prepare for a trip that would normally have taken weeks to arrange. He got his birth certificate certified, a passport, immunization shots and pills to prevent malaria and cholera.

Hargrove was told he would have to wait a week to get his shots, but when nurses at the Snohomish Health District found out why he was in a rush to get vaccinated, they worked during their lunch hours to help him, he said.

Hargrove’s trip is being sponsored by Everett’s Northside Church of God, which is accepting donations for his relief mission.

“I really felt just a total need to go there and help,” he said.

A self-employed contractor who calls himself “a jack of some trades,” Hargrove plans to stay up to a month in Sri Lanka, pitching in wherever needed.

“I just feel so blessed that we’re in a position right now that I can go,” he said. “Most people would like to have an opportunity to go help.”

On Sunday, a contingent of workers from Northwest Medical Teams left for Aceh province of Indonesia, the organization said on its Web site. Those included nurse Sandra Stone of Portland; Dr. Mark Bowman, nurse Larry Hamilton and physician’s assistant Helene Ternican, all of Tillamook, Ore.; a doctor from Vermont; and a firefighter from Washington state.

In a Lynnwood warehouse, meanwhile, volunteers have been folding clothes, answering phones and packing boxes.

“We don’t want to do it at home, but it’s OK here,” Pam Williams told KOMO-TV as she folded shirts, pants and coats with her daughter, Karen.

“I’m doing what little I can do for these people who are all the way across the world,” said Karen Williams.

In another part of the warehouse, volunteers packed boxes with much-needed medical supplies such as Band-Aids, latex gloves and adhesive tape.

Other volunteers were loading those boxes onto pallets to get them ready for their long journey.

“I wanted to give back a little to my community and to the world,” said volunteer Sue Fleiger.

Margaret Larson, of Bellevue, Wash., arrived in Indonesia on New Year’s Eve as a staff member with Oregon-based Mercy Corps.

She told The Associated Press on Sunday that she had been working on logistics for the relief effort and was headed that day to heavily hit Banda Aceh.

“There was never much of an infrastructure there to begin with,” she said in a telephone interview from Medan, on Sumatra.

“Our biggest problem is arranging to get things distributed to the people who need them.”

The relief effort is unlike any other in history, she said.

“This was such a sudden occurrence that created the death toll it did and caused such devastation over a wide area, I just don’t think we’ve seen that combination before,” said Larson, a former foreign correspondent for NBC.

“Oftentimes, we know when disasters are coming. With the Iraq war, for example, we knew where it was going to happen, so we could pre-position goods and begin to prepare.

“There are still some islands off the northern coast of Sumatra that nobody’s been to,” she said.

“Some of the islands that were hit first are going to be the last to receive help.”