A quest for peace recognized

Bobbie Caraher has worked for peace her entire adult life. But unlike many peace activists, she is not involved in religion or politics.

Caraher cares for people. Period.

As a nurse, she has worked in refugee camps the world over, tending to people suffering from starvation, diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis.

This Saturday, she will be honored as one of North Carolina's best nurses. Although she is not traipsing the world as much -- she now works as at Duke Children's Hospital's pediatric bone marrow transplant clinic -- she is doing her best to educate younger colleagues about the devastating toll of war.

"I saw what the effects of war really do to people," said Caraher, 54, who lives in Chapel Hill. "That made me strongly believe in peace. I believe war should never be an answer to anything."

Caraher's example is proof that the quest for peace need not come in the guise of religion or politics. For many people, like Caraher, it's an internal compass that steers them toward easing human suffering. And it is a reminder of an argument many atheists make: People can be good without God.

Caraher is not an atheist. She was reared in a Roman Catholic home in Pittsburgh and still attends Mass every so often. But it was not her faith that got her involved overseas. It was her conviction that the Vietnam War was misguided.

Following the refugees

In 1983, three years after earning her nursing license, she applied to the American Refugee Committee to go to Thailand. Working with the Vietnamese refugees there was so engrossing, Caraher stayed nearly three years. She helped train medics, gave shots, taught about improving the health of mothers and children.

By the time she returned to the United States, it was 1986 and the famine in Ethiopia and what is now Eritrea was all over the news. Caraher applied to work in a camp along the Sudanese border where severely malnourished people were arriving. There, she met her husband, Joe Caraher, a physician from Ireland, who, like her, was dedicated to working with the poor and oppressed people of the world.

When they heard about a civil war in Mozambique, they headed to bordering Malawi. When Afghanistan's Mujahedeen were fighting the invading Russians, they flew to Pakistan's Peshawar district where many of the refugees were taking shelter.

In all these places, Caraher was stunned to find refugees willing to reconcile with their oppressors.

"At first, I couldn't understand it," she said. "These horrible things happened to them -- mothers and fathers murdered, sisters raped. Yet they forgave the people who did that. I asked them, 'Don't you want to kill them yourself?' And they would say 'What good would that do?' "

That convinced Caraher that fighting violence with violence doesn't solve anything.

On return trips to the U.S., she was upset to learn that her friends didn't seem all that concerned with what was happening around the world.

"People didn't know how much suffering there was," she said. "All they cared about was how much money they were making. I was very bitter."

Back home -- for a while

But after giving birth to the second of her four sons while living in Cambodia, she decided that maybe working overseas was no longer practical.

"All day long I would try to keep them from having diarrhea; the water was so bad," she said. "And I thought, what sense was there being there?"

After spending seven years in Ireland, the Carahers settled in Chapel Hill in 2002.

In 2002, Caraher began working at the Duke Children's Hospital where, beyond her nursing duties, she paints murals on the walls and changes them with the seasons. Her motive is to get very sick children up and out of their rooms.

The work is starkly different. Overseas, her daily job might consist of keeping vaccines cold while she found more ice. At Duke, it involves highly technical bone marrow procedures.

Last year, the two worlds came together when Caraher volunteered to go to Pakistan to teach nurses how to start the country's first pediatric bone marrow transplant unit.

The teachings of a Buddhist monk she met overseas help her keep her life's mission in perspective.

"To have world peace it has to come from you first," she explained. "I don't think some leaders are going to make world peace. Once it's a part of you, it can be part of your family and then your community and then it can extend out to the world."