"They are very cooperative, beautiful, and handsome"

So said a Pakistani of thirteen paramedics who, without support from any outside organization, have gone to remote areas of Kashmiri Pakistan to provide medical attention to victims of the earthquake there:

“I mean we're saving lives, many lives, every single day. You know, as a paramedic in New York City once in a while you have a direct influence on life and death. Here it’s happening every half an hour,” says [Joe] Connelly [one of the paramedics].

In New York their job is to keep a patient alive and drive that ambulance to the nearest hospital. Here there are no hospitals or ambulances. No stretchers, either, except one which they made out of floorboards.

Their clinic is a tent next to a military hospital which had been demolished. There was no running water and no electricity, so they were operating by flashlight. And there were tremors and aftershocks all the time.

Yaser Bashir Coker brought his little sister to the clinic and says he had never seen Americans before coming to the clinic.

His first impression? “They are very cooperative, beautiful and handsome.”

It's hard to beat compassion as an expression of who we are and what we're about.

The thirteen paramedics were profiled by Bob Simon on 60 Minutes tonight. Check it out here; it was fantastic!