At the end of January, Ruth Duggan’s client arrived home from work. She was standing outside chatting with a neighbour when suddenly the earth shifted and her house collapsed, instantly killing her father inside.

As a Canadian occupational therapist volunteering in Haiti, Duggan counts on creativity and cooperation to get clients through the calamities. Nine days after the earthquake Duggan met this woman, one of several people stumbling around in shock asking Duggan and her colleagues for help. She joined one of Duggan’s psycho-social support groups for survivors. “I’d ask people in the group, How many of you lost your home? Your job? Someone you loved? Every single person had experienced all of these.”

Ruth Duggan travels to Port-au-Prince several times a year with Team Canada Healing Hands (TCHH), a non-profit organization dedicated to providing rehabilitation services in countries of need. They are affiliated with the international agency Healing Hands for Haiti. Their rehabilitation clinic in Port-au-Prince crashed down the side of the mountain during the earthquake, accelerating effort to rebuild on flat land and employ greater numbers of newly trained Haitian recruits.Team Canada Healing Hand’s philosophy includes empowering local service providers and then stepping back.  “As an occupational therapist, my job is to work myself out of a job,” said Duggan. Before the quake, the clinic was practically running itself. Local providers were doing assessments, making decisions on therapy, and carrying through so competently that the Canadian team had planned to move on to build a clinic in Belize this spring. But then they were needed in Port-au-Prince again.

There was a large influx of amputees and spinal cord injury patients, as well as people with peripheral nerve damage from being buried beneath debris for several days. Duggan’s work right after the earthquake included handing out crutches, teaching patients with prosthetic limbs how to move and training new community health workers – often people right off the street. Creativity was a key element in her work. So was compassion – a quality she also found to be abundant in the new recruits. “The biggest things people talked about were prayer and helping people. Doing this work gave them a purpose for their day, instead of just sitting and looking at the rubble.” Rather than providing prefabricated equipment that can’t be repaired if it breaks down, TCHH teaches rehabilitation techniques to clients using materials they have on hand. Duggan said that modifying tasks with local materials demonstrates to newly trained Haitian rehabilitation technicians how simple adaptations can make daily activities easier. “This challenges us to return to the roots of occupational therapy and explore our creative side. For instance, a local carpenter was taught how to make adapted spoons and cutting boards with available wood and cardboard.”

Thinking outside the box also applies to Duggan’s work in Canada. She runs Cornerstone Occupational Therapy Consultants in Halifax, holding educational sessions and consultations with employers and insurers, and meeting community-based rehabilitation needs for individual clients throughout Nova Scotia.Duggan’s earlier international work included three years in Kuwait, where she learned how to respectfully address cultural differences. “When I first went to Kuwait I was very naive. I thought that I could just go in and tell people what to do. But you can’t. You have to adjust what we’re doing to fit the culture. And you can’t just tell people, ‘Well, in Canada it’s this way and we should strive for that here.’ You have to work toward what’s right for that community. And that translates back to here in Nova Scotia, in finding what’s right for the individual client.”

As well as Kuwait and Haiti, Duggan has also worked in Trinidad and Tobago, and Vladimir, Russia. She traces her interest in international volunteer work to learning about the 2005 earthquake in Iran. “I remember hearing about it on the news: thirty thousand people died, their hospitals were damaged, and I thought, ‘There must be something I can do to help.’”

This article highlights exceptional work done by an exceptional health professional in the rehabilitation industry. Please send suggestions for future profiles to publisher@thehealthprofessional.ca.

Noreen Shanahan is a writing instructor and a freelance journalist. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Reader’s Digest, Geist, CBC Radio and other places. She can be reached at nshanahan@rogers.com.