For Humankind: Jaffna’s Medics in Eternal Service

I’ve spent most of my adult life building things. Businesses, brands,
homes, arguments. Always chasing—the next goal, the next deal, the
next piece of validation in a world that measures worth by margins and
milestones. But this past week, watching my mother fight for her life in a small hospital in northern Sri Lanka, I was reminded of something I had forgotten: not all heroes chase.

  … Dr Samuel Fiske Green

It began in Kumulamunai. A heart attack. A real one. Silent but
severe. My mother—diabetic, hypertensive, and until that moment,
unstoppable—suffered what doctors later described as a near-total
occlusion. A 99% block in the right circumflex artery. She had been
slipping quietly into danger for days. No textbook symptoms. No drama.
Just a quiet march toward a cliff.The team at Mullaitivu Hospital moved with speed and certainty. They
administered a thrombolytic agent—what the rest of us call a “clot
buster”—and bought her precious time. She was then transferred across
district lines to Jaffna, where a team of doctors and nurses, in a
system with barely enough gloves to go around, performed a high-stakes
angioplasty and placed a stent that saved her life. Not once did I
hear the word “payment.” Not once did I feel we were anything but in
capable hands.Now here’s the part that truly knocked the wind out of me: they didn’t
have to do any of it. Two thousand doctors have left Sri Lanka in the
past three years. They’ve gone to the UK, Australia, the Middle
East—anywhere that offers better pay, better hours, better everything.
The doctors who stayed behind? They’re the outliers. The stubborn. The
selfless. The ones who choose purpose over perks.

I spent time with them. I watched them scrub in and out without a
pause, without fanfare, without complaint. I saw a cardiologist
explain a procedure to an elderly villager in fluent Tamil, without
condescension. I watched a nurse adjust a patient’s pillow like she
was tucking in her own child. I saw joy in the act of healing—real
joy, not performative compassion. And I realised something quietly
devastating: these people are happier than most of us.

There is peace in purpose. A kind of wealth that isn’t counted in
digits but in dignity. And it is abundant here.

My mother was in the ER in Canada just weeks before this trip. High
blood pressure. Worrying signs. But the system—hamstrung by protocol
and overregulation—missed the looming heart attack. The very thing
that a government hospital in war-scarred, budget-strapped northern
Sri Lanka caught and treated with surgical precision. I don’t say this
to score points. I say it because it humbled me.

We often talk about what’s broken in Sri Lanka. We talk about
corruption, collapse, and crisis. And there’s truth in that. But
somewhere amid the bureaucracy and broken roads is a public healthcare
system that works. That shines. That makes you proud. And sometimes,
it takes a stent in your mother’s heart to see it clearly.

To those doctors in Jaffna and Mullaitivu – to the nurses, the
orderlies, the drivers who transported her between towns and hope—I
owe more than gratitude. I owe perspective.

We may have built a world that worships money. But in those
fluorescent-lit hospital wards, I met people who worship life.

And they are the richer for it.

             &&&&&

Charles Schokman’s NOTE:  “I am sharing a story by a Sri Lankan domiciled in Canada who has written about a hospital in northern Sri Lanka.. it’s a masterpiece…”