Kansas City, Mo. ? Trish Blair of Columbia traveled halfway around the world to run a camp in Georgia for children with diabetes.

Then the fighting over South Ossetia began.

Blair closed the camp, in a mountain resort town less than 60 miles from the disputed region. She chartered a bus for her campers and bumped along gravel roads for 12 hours to get to the capital, Tbilisi. The 40 children need to be with their parents, she e-mailed friends in Missouri.

Bombers knocked out the airport, destroyed cell phone towers, damaged the electrical grid and sent more than 70,000 refugees into the city.

Two fellow volunteers – Blair’s nephew, Greg Blair of Columbia, and Cliff Franklin of Lawrence – joined an evacuation of 170 people arranged by the U.S. Consulate.

But not Trish Blair, 63. The founder and president of the nonprofit ACTS International, she has been helping the people of Georgia since 1992. The refugees will need medical care, the former trauma surgeon said in an e-mail.

Coming home

It took more than 40 hours for Cliff Franklin to reach Kansas City. But there he was Tuesday night at KCI, stubble long on his face, wearing a new soccer shirt he’d bought at another airport and needing a shower.

Franklin had hours to think about what he’d lived through. How the Russian television reports differed wildly from the Georgian news stories. How the people of Georgia seemed so strong in the face of this violence. How they loved their president and freedom.

Franklin has visited Georgia three times to volunteer at the camp. A diabetic, he knows how important it is for children to learn how to manage the condition.

But in Georgia, until Trish Blair and ACTS International began teaching medical staff about insulin and blood sugar management, children with the disease diagnosis usually lived only 10 years.