Officer of Distinction

When Don Ryan’s GlobalMedic team came across a Sri Lankan girl being hauled onto a moped, they knew they had to stop. She was already foaming at the mouth, and the hospital was 16 kilo-metres down a rough road. The bike wasn’t going to make it. “We took her in our truck,” he says, arguing past military checkpoints to get her there in time. Not bad for a Toronto police officer with little medical training.

Today, with 11 assignments under his belt, Ryan is one of GlobalMedic’s longest-serving volunteers, donating his vacation time to deploy when disaster or conflict strikes, as a member of its Rapid Response Team (RRT). In his seven years with GM, a Canadian emergency services charity, he’s travelled to some of the furthest corners of the plane—Cambodia, Guatemala, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Haiti and the Dominican Republic—encountering people at their worst and best.

These days Ryan says he’s found his niche, now specializing in water purification set-up and training. When disasters happen, getting clean water to people is a top priority, and it’s a task GlobalMedic does particularly well. In 2005, he deployed to Guatemala after a hurricane caused floods that contaminated 
local supplies. Ironically, despite the flooding, the greatest challenge in setting up a purification system is finding a viable supply to draw from. “It took four days to find a place to install it,” he says, because you can’t use floodwater full of pesticides and debris. With the system up and running, GM was able to distribute more than 25,000 litres a day, including potable water trucked out to people in remote areas.

Turnaround time is better now—Ryan has become a water-
dispensing expert. His colleagues say he’s a decisive, on-his-feet thinker. In 2007, he set up a water system in Pakistan to serve 90,000 people, and later installed 15 in the Dominican Republic, staying long enough to train local people in their operation.

Despite the dire circumstances, Ryan says stress is oddly absent on these missions, and the people he meets, magnificent. “You’re walking down a road looking for a water source and come across a hut with a family. They’re smiling and inviting you in for a meal.” You smile back, he says, accepting their hospitality. And every time it happens, you’re awed by how 
common decency always trumps crisis.

—Deborah Sanborn