Within a week of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, Dr. David Beyda had a team of 10 volunteers, mostly from Phoenix, in the rubble, taking care of the injured.
They'll go back at the end of March and again in July, even though the harrowing things Beyda saw there haunt him still.
A critical-care doctor at Phoenix Children's Hospital, Beyda has made 40 trips to 15 countries in the six years since he became medical director for Mission of Mercy, a non-profit group that identifies needy children in 22 countries and provides them with medical care, food and education.
Beyda, 58, and his volunteers go places where others wouldn't dare go or couldn't stomach. Sometimes, the only way to get to parts of such countries as Cambodia and Kenya is for Beyda, who's also a pilot, to fly them in. He's fluent in French, speaks some Italian, can understand a little Thai and even gets by in Cambodia with his halting Khmer.
The good doctor is like something out of a movie. Beyda would blush if I said that to his face. He's a very humble man.
"It's not about me," he says repeatedly. But this story is about him - and, granted, many other people - and the kids they care for.
Beyda's father was a career diplomat who moved overseas with his family when Beyda was 7, first to Somalia, then to Tunisia and later to Laos. Even as a child, Beyda knew he wanted to be a doctor.
"It was just in my heart," he says. At 6, he would trace a picture of the heart in his dictionary until he could draw it freehand.
As a teenager, Beyda attended boarding school in Italy but returned to Laos for summers and holidays. He was just 15 the first time he assisted in surgery with a medical group working there. That same year, he learned to fly with Air America pilots.
Beyda attended college in the United States. When he was 27 and still in his third year of his pediatric residency, Beyda was tapped by the United Nations to be the director of pediatrics at a refugee camp in Khao I Dang on the Thai-Cambodian border.
In his first 10 minutes there, he watched helplessly as three children died. Hundreds more would follow, spurred to their deaths by squalor and a lack of food, medicine and adequate medical equipment.
The six months Beyda spent there in 1979 set the course for the kind of doctor he turned out to be.
Beyda followed his residency with a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and came to Phoenix in 1982.
After 23 years as medical director and chief of pediatric critical care at Phoenix Children's Hospital, Beyda now is working regular rounds as a pediatric critical-care doctor, giving up the administrative post so he could volunteer with Mission of Mercy.
It's heartbreaking work. But Beyda doesn't flinch at children with grossly extended bellies in Ethiopia or 6-year-old girls in Swaziland who have been raped and infected with HIV. They don't need pity, Beyda says.
"They need to feel that you genuinely care for them and that you love them, no matter what," he says.
Language is never an issue, no matter where he goes. He treats children in the bush in Kenya and the slums of India like he treats his young patients in Phoenix - with love, kind words and open arms. Hugs are universal.
Beyda and his wife of 30 years, Charlcye, have two boys, 26 and 28.
Beyda had been in Haiti with a team of 20 volunteers and 600 pounds of medicine just two months before the Jan. 12 earthquake. Over five days in Cap-Haitien, they treated 1,300 children for malnutrition, diarrhea and other infections.
When Beyda returned with a team of 10 volunteers after the earthquake, they chartered a flight from Miami to Port-au-Prince and headed to the Carrefour neighborhood. He doesn't know how his little patients in Cap-Haitien fared in the disaster.
Beyda's team knew what to expect from the news reports on television, but nothing prepared them for the scope of the devastation. There was no time to recoil at the stench of death, not with all the people in need of help.
In an alley between two toppled buildings, the team set up a makeshift clinic. Within minutes, local people were bringing in the injured, some just dragged from the rubble. Some of the team fanned out into Carrefour, setting broken bones and inserting intravenous lines of antibiotics right where people lay in the streets.
Beyda wrapped the stump of the amputated left arm of a 10-year-old boy who had been buried in the rubble for three days, his mother lying on his shattered arm. She died on the second day. The boy's father and two siblings were missing. Beyda hopes he offered the boy some comfort.
He knows there are plenty of children in the United States who need help, too, but other doctors here can help them. Who will help the kids in the rubble of Haiti, the Kenyan bush, the slums of India?
In their white coats and with so many people's lives in their hands, doctors command great respect around the world. So it's understandable, Beyda says, when they sometimes get an overinflated self-image. It's this kind of work that has changed him.
"It makes me look outside of myself rather than inside," Beyda says. "It makes me realize that there's something bigger and more powerful than me."
Reach bland at 602-444-8614 or karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com.
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