Last year, Shea recruited a doctor by doubling his government salary and offering him the only private room in the 20-room hospital, which he rents for US$250 a month. Shea himself sleeps on a mattress in a room he shares with staff members.
“The things you see here are only because of CDRS,” said Dr Rizwan Shabir, 27, who left a comfortable practice in Muzaffarabad, a city of 300,000, to come here. “Frankly, without Todd, there would be no proper medicine, and patients would be dead.”
Still, CDRS is more makeshift than miracle. On a recent morning, Shabir treated 140 patients in five hours. Without blood-testing laboratories, he diagnoses common illnesses like hepatitis and tuberculosis through clinical evaluations.
Outside of Chikar, CDRS supplements 10 other regional government health outposts by paying salaries and purchasing medicines. Overall, it treats about 100,000 patients annually, and 70 percent are women and children.
Shea is an unlikely person to reform Chikar’s decades of medical neglect. At age 12, he went into a deep depression when his mother died of a Valium overdose. By 18, he was addicted to crack cocaine.
In 1992, he moved from his native Maryland to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music career, and spent the next decade playing in bars and restaurants around the country. At one point, he was forced to sell his own blood plasma for US$40 a week to pay the bills.
He moved to New York City in 1998, and had a gig booked at CBGB, the famed music club, on Sept. 12, 2001. As he watched the World Trade Center burn and fall, from his balcony, he promptly emptied his band van and used it over the next week to ferry meals to firefighters at Ground Zero.
He soon became addicted to rescue efforts, and volunteered in Sir Lanka after the tsunami. It was his first time overseas. After Hurricane Katrina, he volunteered with another rescue organization. Then the earthquake hit Pakistan, and he left for a country he knew nothing about.
Once in Chikar, he met a local MBA student, Afzel Makhdoom, who had just dragged his aunt out from under the rubble of his home. As soon as he could scrape together the money, Shea hired him.
“I had never met an American before,” said Makhdoom, now 24. “My first impression was: They just want to kill Muslims; it’s an invasion, and they’ll never go back home. But now we want to keep this American here.”
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