Requiem for a Humanitarian

Connie Frisbee Houde Remembers Dr. Tom Little

by Lorna Tychostup and photographs by Connie Frisbee Houde , October 26, 2010

On August 7th of this year the New York Times reported that 10 members of an unpaid volunteer team of doctors, nurses, and technicians making their way back to Kabul after delivering free health care in a remote region of Afghanistan were murdered in cold blood. Unidentified gunmen sporting long red beards herded the group into the woods, lined them up, and one-by-one shot all but one dead. The lucky man, an Afghan, said he was spared because he had dropped to his knees while reciting from the Koran.

Dr. Tom Little, a Delmar-based ophthalmologist, was one of the medical team members killed. Dr. Tom began doing outreach work in Afghanistan in 1976, lived in Kabul raising his family through the Soviet invasion, and had spent the last three decades providing eye care to Afghans in need via the National Organization of Ophthalmic Rehabilitation Eye Care Program (NOOR), Afghanistan’s singular eye care program. NOOR’s mission has been to train Afghans to run the program and to carry out the surgical eye camps held in remote areas of the country where little to no aid is present.

In our November 2005 issue, photojournalist and activist Connie Frisbee Houde profiled Dr. Tom, a childhood playmate, after traveling with NOOR in Afghanistan and documenting their singular eye care program.
The news of Dr. Tom’s death caused me to remember Connie’s e-mail earlier in the year  announcing her trip to Afghanistan for the month of August. Unsure if she said she’d be traveling once again with Dr. Tom or not, I began searching her out on the Internet. It was with great relief I found her alive and well in Herat, where she had just heard of the killings. Unable to comment at the time, I caught up with Connie in October and asked her to share her experience in the wake of this incomprehensible crime.

Lorna Tychostup: Did you ever think something like this would happen?
Connie Frisbee Houde: At Tom’s memorial service, a person was describing what Tom had said when he began working in Afghanistan: You know your life is at risk. You have to just make peace with that and go on and do your work or you can drive yourself nuts worrying about it every time you walk out the door.

From everything I’ve read, Tom was very low key. Yet he did so much and endeared so many people to him.
That’s the kind of guy he was. You could rely on him. You knew he knew what he was doing and he just quietly went about and did his work. He didn’t make waves and yet in other ways he did. Early on, he set up a program of doing the eye camps and going out into rural areas. I was told recently that [NOOR] probably won’t be doing them anymore because they don’t have anyone like Tom. He spearheaded the program and made it work.