Kansas midwife takes her skills, and her heart, to refugees in Turkey

Though reports out of Turkey have focused on last month’s terrorist attack at Ataturk airport in Istanbul and last week’s attempted military coup, for Kansas midwife Michelle Ruebke, the most important issue in Turkey today is its massive refugee population.

More than 2.7 million people who have fled the Syrian civil war have now settled in Turkey, which connects Syria to Europe.

Ruebke, 51, arrived in Izmir, Turkey, on June 26. Since then, she has seen hundreds of Syrian and Kurdish refugees at camps around the city whose complaints range from diabetes to ear infections to complications from pregnancy.

Working alongside a local translator who is himself a refugee, as well as with a doctor and a nurse, Ruebke spends hours seeing patients in the plastic tents of Izmir’s refugee camps.

“It’s exhausting,” Ruebke admitted. “But I have a skill that is really needed, and I knew there was a need working with the Syrian refugees in Turkey.”

The attitude is characteristic of Ruebke, said her daughter, Hope. The Newton-based midwife has made similar volunteer trips over the past several years, visiting Haiti, the Philippines and Peru.

“She goes above and beyond what is expected of her,” Hope Ruebke said. “Even if she doesn’t have the funding, she will go no matter what – she will find a way.”

Hope Ruebke, 22, just returned from two years volunteering in Haiti. She said the whole family is “very mission-minded” and has been keeping up with their mother’s work through her Facebook posts and the occasional email.

“It’s been exciting,” Hope Ruebke said of her mother’s Turkey trip. “We’re all very proud of her, though we’ve also been worried as it is a very hard place to be.”

‘Precious people’

Michelle Ruebke and the other volunteers from MedVint, a Switzerland-based medical nonprofit organization, wake up early to pick up their translator before heading to the local pharmacy, where they spend hundreds of dollars each day on medications for the refugees.

Ruebke says they visit each of the approximately 25 camps they serve about every two weeks. They spend at least three hours in each camp, though sometimes the visits last much longer.

“The people here that I’ve worked with are just precious people – when we come into a camp they are so grateful and hospitable,” Ruebke said.

She said she is frustrated by the lack of support refugees receive from the Turkish government and from local hospitals. She recalled seeing a young refugee woman whose family had brought her to a local hospital, where the refugee woman was made to wait outside until she was ready to deliver and then sent back to the refugee camp immediately after her baby was born.

“There are so many patients we tell, ‘You need to go to a hospital for this, this is serious,’ and every single time the answer is, ‘We just went,’ ‘We were there yesterday,’ or ‘We went last week’ and ‘They refused to care for us, they just pushed us out the door,’” Ruebke said.

Her Facebook page, on which Ruebke is posting daily updates about her work in the camps, includes several other stories of refugees struggling to receive necessary medical care at Turkish hospitals.

Ruebke also solicits donations to her GoFundMe page on Facebook and has been asking for additional medical professionals – particularly a dentist, a chiropractor and an ear, nose and throat doctor – to come to Izmir.

Also frustrating to Ruebke is the lack of basic resources in the camps. Ruebke said she and the other volunteers treat dozens of refugees suffering from diarrhea and other illnesses as a result of unclean or fertilizer-contaminated water.

Earlier this week, though, she announced a partnership on her Facebook page with the nonprofit Waves for Water to bring water filtration systems to the camps.

When Ruebke and her fellow MedVint volunteers arrive at a camp, she said they begin by treating women and their children, as the women will not talk about female-specific health problems in front of the men. The work can be slow, as they have to talk to all the refugees through their translator. Though the Syrian refugees speak Arabic, she said they sometimes see Kurdish refugees who do not, in which case they have to find someone in the camp who speaks Kurdish and Arabic to translate for their translator.

Ruebke and the other volunteers take a day off every seven to nine days to recuperate from long days in the camps, but struggle to enjoy the breaks when they know people need their help.

She recalled a trip to the ocean on one of their first days off when the volunteers went to the seaside to swim and enjoy the beach, but could not stop thinking about the refugees they had been treating.

“We remembered that those were really the same waters where thousands of refugees have perished trying to reach freedom,” she said. “It was hard to keep enjoying the water after that.”

Though it has been an eventful several weeks for Turkey, Ruebke said recent incidents have not affected her work much. Izmir is far from the Istanbul airport where suicide bombers detonated explosives in June, and unrest related to an attempted military coup last week did not stop her and her team from getting out to the camps.

“She’s not afraid of anything, which comes in handy in situations like this,” Hope Ruebke said.

For Michelle Ruebke, the hardest part will be leaving on Aug. 3 at the end of her six-week trip. The MedVint doctor and nurse who were in Izmir when she first arrived have already left, replaced by new volunteers.

“The team is constantly fluctuating, but we try to have an overlap so that we can pass information and the need for follow-up care along before we leave,” she said.

“Still, the situation is really worse than I imagined when I came, and leaving with it still being just as bad is difficult.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 5:28 PM with the headline "Kansas midwife takes her skills, and her heart, to refugees in Turkey."