Partners In Health Haiti Earthquake Recovery

Thank you for your generous support of Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante! Each and every day our work to provide high quality health care in Haiti continues. We’re pleased to share with you a personal story by a Partners In Health Staff member from Haiti, where PIH staff helps starving kids get back to health. An excerpt is below; please check out the full story here.

On January 12, 2010, I was in the middle of my afternoon workout at an underground gym in Petion-ville, a neighborhood within Port-au-Prince, when the ground suddenly started shaking. I was underwhelmed at first. As the shaking grew stronger, I remember feeling a loss of control I had never experienced before, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world around me was crumbling. My first instinct was to make my way outside. I barely made it to the parking lot when a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything in front of me. A four-story supermarket had collapsed nearby. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear people screaming, “Letènel, Oh Letènel!” (Haitian Creole for “God”), but also singing prayers. Somehow it was reassuring; it meant the world had not ended.

That night, my family and I gathered on the cracked asphalt just outside my driveway, sitting and holding hands anxiously as the aftershocks came one after the other. I felt guilty for being alive while so many had perished in vain. My helplessness vis-à-vis this tragedy only fueled my anger as I grew impatient for the opportunity to provide a helping hand.

The following morning, my brother and I filled my old pick-up truck with water bottles and headed downtown, the hardest hit area, to see if we could help. What we thought would be a simple distribution of clean water turned out to be a surprising medical adventure we will never forget.

We encountered such an overwhelming number of severely injured people, from pregnant women to small infants, that our truck quickly filled after a few minutes on the road. They told us they had been denied access by local clinics, but we decided to bring them back anyway. We found a Doctors Without Borders clinic up the road, where a group of people was banging on the locked gates. My brother and I introduced ourselves as volunteers and urged the guards to open the gates. They must have thought we were foreigners, perhaps because of our light skin, and allowed us entry.

To this day, I cannot find words to describe what we saw as we walked through the giant gates. There were hundreds of trauma patients lying next to each other on the parking lot because beds were full inside. They screamed relentlessly in agonizing pain, while unsanitary pieces of clothing covered their open wounds. As we walked in, we realized it was impossible to not accidentally step on someone, whose desperate family members begged us for help.

For the next 72 hours, we became part of a makeshift staff of volunteers, supervised by one foreign doctor and two Haitian nurses. While we had no formal medical training, we were able to triage and identify the critically injured, bandage them, and provide them with pre-operative care before they were sent to a surgical facility. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our trauma cases did not make it that far; they ended up succumbing to their injuries.

Now, nine years later, some hard-hit sites in Port-au-Prince have changed dramatically, and most lots are cleared of rubble and tents. Some places have seen more progress than others, but one thing is clear: Haiti still has far to go before it can say it has been “built back better.” Efforts to decentralize resources from the capital city, such as the construction of PIH’s University Hospital in Mirebalais in the Central Plateau, provide a source of hope.