Just days after the devastating earthquake shook the small Caribbean island of Haiti, Dr. Basil Jackson traveled with a team of medical professionals and pastoral counselors to Port-au-Prince to provide health care and support to victims.
The earthquake registered 7.0 on the Richter scale and hit just 16 miles west of the Haitian capital on Jan. 12, killing more than 220,000 people, injuring 300,000 and displacing more than 1.3 million.
However, Jackson, a 78-year-old psychiatrist on staff at Community Memorial Hospital in Menomonee Falls, didn’t think twice about getting on a plane to volunteer his services. He and a friend, Dr. Dennis Hill, ultimately stayed for two weeks at the main hospital tent set up on the Port-au-Prince airport grounds to provide basic first aid, psychological care and comfort to traumatized children and adults.
“I’m an old man with a deep faith, but faith doesn’t count unless you do something about it in your behavior and your actions,” Jackson told NBC Nightly News, which recently recognized Jackson’s service in one of its “Making a Difference” news segments.
Jackson has volunteered at disasters all over the world. But what he saw in Haiti, he told the news crew, changed his life.
In a recent e-mail interview with BizTimes, Jackson said he spends a large percentage of his time serving the less privileged. For most of his professional career, he has visited and served Third World countries. His experiences have included teaching medical students in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, providing basic medical and surgical services to a primitive tribe in the Amazon jungle, serving in a leper colony in Indonesia, setting up a school for Zulu tribes in South Africa, and using his influence to mediate opposing combatants in Ireland.
Jackson said he is called by his faith to serve.
“Where will I find myself next? That is up to the Lord,” he said.
