CAPE HUSBAND AND WIFE TO HELP STORM VICTIMS

During his month in the Caribbean, Dr. C. John Ritter will enjoy the white sandy beaches and turquoise blue waters but the trip won't exactly be a vacation.

Ritter, a Cape Girardeau physician, and his wife Marcia, a nurse, will spend most of November at a clinic providing medical care to residents of Barbuda, a tiny island nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The island was battered by Hurricane Luis, and residents are still rebuilding.

"Approximately 90 percent of the roofs were knocked off the houses, and the school was damaged," Ritter said. The community house where he and his wife would have stayed was destroyed, but another home has been found for them.

"I called the clinic and said, 'How are you doing?' and they said, `Well, we're doing all right,'" Ritter said.

The Ritters are volunteers with the Doctors to the World program, which sends physicians worldwide to medically underserved nations. Ritter signed up with the program in 1991 and went to Barbuda for the first time in 1993. This is his second trip to the island. The Ritters will leave for Barbuda Oct. 30 and will return Nov. 28.

"The first time we were there, we really had a lot of trouble adjusting for the first week or so," he said. "All the mosquitoes and the insects come in through the screens and just sort of crawl all over you. After that we got to know the people and were just delighted with them."

The Ritters will be providing basic care to residents while they're on the island.

"We don't see a lot of tropical diseases. We see people with hypertension and diabetes and skin disorders," he said. "Medicine is very limited. The government provides some of the medicine and they pay the rest."

Lab facilities on Barbuda are very limited, he said, and it's not uncommon for the pharmacy to run out of prescription medications. Emergency cases are taken by helicopter to Antigua.

On his last trip, he said, a patient developed appendicitis and was taken to Antigua on Saturday "and they operated on him on Wednesday," Ritter said.

Donating his time and medical skills is something Ritter has always wanted to do.

"I've always felt that if God wanted me to be a physician and allowed me to be a physician that I should repay him in some way, and this service is one way I should do that," he said.

He joined the Peace Corps at one time, but the Army drafted him and sent him to Japan.

Barbuda, which is affiliated with and adjacent to Antigua, is under British rule and has about 1,200 inhabitants. The only city on the island, Cardington, is named after the first British settler, Lord Cardington. The island's residents are descendants of Lord Cardington's slaves, whom he abandoned there after Great Britain outlawed slavery in 1834.

"About 400, 450 people are students," Ritter said. "Most of the people in the work force leave the island and go other places to obtain work."

Barbuda measures 48 square miles, is fairly flat and has no surface water. "The island's kind of round and it has one road that's six miles long," he said. That road serves a total of about 30 cars.

Two "very exclusive, very expensive" resorts are located on the island, Ritter said, but they're only open three months a year. The island has little agriculture and no industry and most income is produced by fishing and lobstering.

The island is surrounded by coral reefs that make navigation tricky and has no deep-water port, which makes it unsuitable for cruise ships to dock there, he said.

"There's a generator but there's no central water plant, so sometimes you have electricity and sometimes you have running water, but most people use cisterns or wells," Ritter said. "It's rather primitive there."

Ritter has been in practice in Cape Girardeau for 26 years. Marcia Ritter is nurse administrator at St. Francis Medical Center.