Above: the home of FHM's Delson Merisier after the quake
On-going Earthquake Updates
from Family Health Ministries
- Week of 1 February 2010
NEW BRIEF UPDATE FROM FHM EXEC DIRECTOR KATHY WALMER LATE THURSDAY
Dear Friends,
We saw a record 310 patients today. That makes us just short of 1200 patients for the week. A very tired team will finish their last clinic day tomorrow. The team has been a fantastic group and they have worked so well together. Each person has brought a real depth of character and experience of service to the group. I am truly thankful to each and every one of them as well as their families back home who let them go for the week.
I was able to drive our van over to Dalmas 3 and the 4C pharmacy and buy enough drug to get us through the week. Yes, I drove the new van for the first time…while it actually was my first time driving in Haiti. I made Napeau, our clinic administrator, wear his seat belt. We were probably the only people in Haiti wearing seat belts. I had a distinct feeling he had drawn the short straw and was the “volunteer” to go with me on my first venture out. To add to the adventure it had been a few years since I have driven a standard shift. It is actually like riding a bike…you never completely forget. This actually was a nice diversion from the daily needs of the moment!
We will finish clinic tomorrow. The team will be packing up in the evening for their trek back over the DR border and onto Santa Domingo on Saturday. They should be home on Sunday afternoon. I plan to stay in PAP this weekend and head out to Fondwa the first of next week. I am looking forward to finally seeing the Sisters.
Thanks for all your words of encouragement and prayers. I have only received a few of the emails that all of you have sent. I can see a few hundred out there in cyberspace, but they don’t seem to want to down load to my outlook. If you have not heard from me, please know I am not ignoring you.
Many Blessings,
Kathy
Haiti Reflections - a video posted on FaceBook reflecting on anFHM mission trip in February 2009 and the current situation in Haiti with lots of shots of places that no longer exist (14:19)
Dr. Jim Snapper (right) of Chapel Hill, NC, with a 110-year old woman patient (center),
accompanied by her daughter (left)
NEW BLOG UPDATE FROM THE MEDICAL TEAM AT FHM'S BLANCHARD CLINIC IN PAP, HAITI (4 February 2010)
Written Wednesday evening: We just returned from a drive around Cite Soleil and downtown. The devastation there is much, much worse than what we’ve been seeing around the clinic. We’ve basically been in a suburb – the houses are spaced a bit further apart and two story buildings were rare. Therefore, while the devastation is very real – it’s not as packed together and overwhelming. People have space to sleep on the ground on in simple shelters next to their (former) homes.
We did clinic this morning, seeing a mere ~150 people. This brings our total for the week to the high 800’s. Honestly, we could be plus or minus fifty. We try to track patients with a rudimentary chart (piece of paper with name, vitals, chief complaint, evaluation by the doctor, treatment administered, drugs prescribed, and so on) but urgent cases pre-empt that process. I’ve also lost count of how many people have been carried past me in a fireman’s (two man) carry as I worked filling small containers with our limited drug supply.
Editor's note: The drug supply has been replenished with a purchase from a local Haitian pharmacy.
Google maps and Google Earth have remarkable overhead imagery of the city, updated after the quake. I would encourage everyone to take a look at the national palace, the cathedral, and Cite Soleil for reference on what I’m writing here.
Cite Soleil is built on top of the former garbage dump of the city. Not the most stable of foundations – but it’s also explicitly intended for some of the poorest people in the Hemisphere. The poverty there was intense prior to the quake. When it rains, the sewage from the city flows through Cite Soleil on its way to the sea. We stopped at a church supported by the group I’m with (Family Health Ministries). It would normally seat about 2,000 people, but it is unusable due to many cracks through the foundation and walls.
The architect traveling with our team picked up a fist sized piece of concrete from the foundation and crushed it to powder between his hands. “You couldn’t build a doghouse on this foundation anymore,” were his exact words. Apparently once concrete has set, subjecting it to severe compression and strain will weaken it structurally.
We then drove to the national cathedral and the palace. Frankly, I’ve never felt so safe in Port Au Prince before. You can find footage of those buildings on CNN and so on. It’s a lot more intense up close. A city builds a cathedral as an expression of their hopes and dreams – the architectural pinnacle of what they can accomplish. Seeing that reduced to rubble took a lot out of me.
A lot of buildings looked fairly normal, until you realized that you were looking at a second floor resting at street level.
On the other hand, we passed US, Brazilian, and French military and construction convoys. We chatted with several members of other groups who were getting on with the business of building infrastructure.
People are living in clusters of strangely homogenous tents. Here, a hundred from Coleman. There, 200 from the Rotary.
NEW WEDNESDAY NIGHT EMAIL FROM FHM EXEC DIRECTOR KATHY WALMER ON MEDICAL TEAM ACTIVITIES (4 February 2010)
We continued to see patients for the fourth day at the FHM clinic in Blanchard, PAP. We saw another 150 patients by 1:00pm today. This makes our total just short of 900 people for the week. We are beginning to run low on some of our popular medications and I will try to get to the 4C Pharmacy tomorrow. It seems odd that I am having to buy drug from the local agency, in a country that supposedly has so much aid available.
We took the afternoon off and went first to the Christen Community Church of Cite Soleil. The entire wall around the compound is down and it seemed strange to look right out into the cite. The church has huge cracks and places where the concrete floor has literally pushed upward into the sanctuary.
We took the new FHM van (this was my first ride) to downtown PAP. We stopped at the Catholic Cathedral where the historic landmark laid in rubble. We then walked to Trinity Episcopal Church a few blocks over first passing a school where a man and is three year old son sat alone in the street. When asked why he sat there he said many of his friends were buried there and he felt he needed to stand watch. It was a sober moment and it was hard not to wonder what had happened to those students whose names we read from the papers that littered the street.
We eventually found Trinity Episcopal. I have been there many times over the last 10 years and if someone had not shown me the spot where the church once stood, I would have walked right by. The entire church is gone. One lone mural from all the historic paintings that once stood there was still visible among the ruins. Someone on our team commented that a truly sacred place is now gone.
We also visited the Presidential Palace, the tent cities of downtown and Bishop Duracin of the Haitian Diocese.
Our time out in the city helped us all put our experience of this week into prospective. It is truly a blessing to be alive, to be able to serve the poor and maybe bring some hope to our Haitian friends. They continue to minister to us daily in their kind acts of love. This evening Janet, a nurse in our clinic who lost her mother three weeks ago, came over with a papaya and all the fixings to make us a fresh papaya drink. It is these moments we are reminded what it is to be a humble servant.
Good Night my Friends,
Kathy
Blogpost from Chris Dwan, FHM Team Member in Haiti, for his colleagues back in Boston, MA
This will be a quick update, because I suspect that I would be asleep long before I could even summarize our entire trip.
We’re in the ‘Blanchard’ or ‘Terre Noir’ neighborhood, perhaps a mile north of Cite Soleil – in Port au Prince. The clinic building where we are working survived the earthquake in remarkably good shape. It’s in a walled compound that also contains a 1,000+ seat church and a small school. The school is basically a loss, and the church has a large crack from floor to ceiling on the two side walls. The tower that holds both the satellite dish and the water tank is badly damaged, but standing. We suspect that re-filling the water tank would push it over the edge.
Our clinic is providing mostly ambulatory care. Everyone here is in tremendous emotional stress. The majority of the city are sleeping on the streets, and anyone who we can get talking has lost friends and family just a couple of weeks ago. For perhaps 75% of the patients, we’re really providing a friendly face, some painkillers, mild sedatives (benadryl) to help with the nightmares, and so on. A chance to get out of the sun for a few hours and have a couple of cups of clean water is probably a bit of help in and of itself.
That said, we’ve unequivocally saved several lives. We had a man collapse and begin to seize with what was most likely meningitis on Sunday. The doctors started IVs, maintained his airway, and managed to stabilize him. The hospitals refused him, so we wound up having him driven to his house. He came back the next day, walking and talking – and thanking us.
We’ve been working our orthopedic doctor to the bone – in some cases re-breaking and setting limbs that had begun to heal incorrectly. For these folks, we have conscious sedation, which is a real benefit. Still, the screams are quite something.
For my part, I spent a couple of hours yesterday giving two liters of water with rehydration salts to a severely dehydrated girl. One tiny sip per minute, so she wouldn’t vomit it back up. I spend most of my time working in the pharmacy – dispensing medicines and running the few lab tests that we can do (urinalysis, glucose, hemoglobin, and pregnancy).
I sleep on the roof of the compound with about half the team. A ridge-rest on bare concrete is remarkably comfortable – once you’re tired enough. We generally wake around 6am (to roosters, dogs, and sunrise). Clinic starts at 8am and runs (today) to about 5:30. Like I said, early day. Electricity from the city is nonexistent – but we have both solar and generated power.
Rooftop Satelite Internet Terminal
We’ve seen perhaps 720 people in three days, starting out slow and ramping up to about 270 per day, today and yesterday.
Perhaps a future post can describe the incessant helicopters, and how we’re clearly on the edge of a massively devastated city. For now, food has arrived.
Follow Chris's postings as they progress - with his descriptions and web addresses below.
http://blog.bioteam.net (sanitized for business)
http://fdmts.livejournal.com (may contain profanity and religious
observations)
http://twitter.com/fdmts (itty bitty updates as time permits)
CELLPHONE PICTURES FROM THE BLANCHARD CLINIC (3 February 2010)
From a team member cell phone
(left)
On the rooftop at the Blanchard Clinic where the FHM emergency medical mission team members are sleeping this week.
(right) Even in their current challenging living conditions, patients come to FHM's emergency medical clinic, clean and dressed in their best. This mother brought her child to be treated for malaria.
PICTURES FROM FHM'S MEDICAL MISSION TRIP AT THE BLANCHARD CLINIC
FHM's mission team members crossing the border on foot, from the Dominican Republic to Haiti
(taken and sent by Jim Snapper)
Team helping a new patient
(Sent by Chris Dwan)
DAY TW0 - EMAIL FROM EXEC DIR KATHY WALMER
(2 February 2010)
Details from the Monday medical services offered at FHM's Blanchard Clinic in Port-au-Prince.
Dear Friends,
Today we saw a record 269 patients in one day, making our total 450 patients in 1 ½ days. Although we define our day in number of patients seen it is really the people whose stories have touched our hearts.
Many of our patients share that they are too scared to return to their homes and continue to sleep in the streets. When one mother asked me today what she could do for her 3 year old daughter’s anxiety, I naively answered that she needed to maintain a routine that the child was used to prior to the earthquake such as bedtime. The mother informed me that this is impossible to do since you cannot make your bed in the streets until people are finished driving their cars. She had a good point. I guess everyone is struggling to find a new normal. Unfortunately, most of this country wanders around wondering what exactly this might mean.
Living Conditions at Blanchard
The team is doing well living and working on the second floor of the Blanchard clinic. We spread out throughout the clinic at night to sleep. We are thankful for a roof over our heads and the cool breeze in the evening. A number of our crowd have been venturesome enough to sleep on the roof. I prefer sleeping under the pharmacy table in the front room. We can sleep in a little later in the mornings since we do not have far to travel to the workplace!
Food
There are women who bring us fresh bread and coffee in the morning and in the evening we are getting a hot dinner of rice or beans. With all our food supplies from the States, we are definitely not going hungry, although many of us after this week may never eat tuna fish again.
Water
We have hired a gentleman from the church who is bringing water to both our bathrooms and water to drink. Since we don’t know the status of the Blanchard well we are treating our drinking water. This is Nicole Tinfo’s job and we have crowned her the “Water Queen.” Did you know that you only need 20 purification tablets per 5 gallon container?
Haitian Hospitality
People are so appreciative of our presence here. There are many hugs of relief when we see an old friend for the first time. Our presence in the community brings hope to thoughts we see. The cleaning women saw me washing my clothes this morning and told me next time I am to let her do this for me. Napeau’s wife made our team a hot lunch of a wonderful stew yesterday. Even in a time of tremendous loss our Haitian friends still have a gift for hospitality that transcends all friendship. They know the true meaning of Christian sacrifice and service.
Next Steps
Tomorrow is another full clinic day. We expect to see about the same number of patients. Wednesday we will only work half a day and try to take a tour of Cite Soleil and downtown PAP.
Destruction in PAP
Saturday, I drove through the city and the Palace is just what you see on television. I truly was at a loss of words to see the Palace and in the park next door a huge tent city. These are the times I have great questions and sadness and I have to remind myself we need to take each day at a time.
Many Blessings,
Kathy
PICTURES OF PLANES LANDING ON BYPASS IN LEOGANE, NEXT TO FHM'S HOSPITAL PROPERTY
( 1 February 2010)
Pictures taken by Jimmy Hite, architect, and designer of FHM's proposed hospital complex in Leogane, Haiti.
The small planes, above, landed on the highway bypass in Leogane, adjacent to FHM's sugar cane field (back left) and future site of the Leogane Family Health and Research Center. These planes or ones like them brought emergency medical supplies from FHM's Durham, NC, office, where they were collected from Duke Remedy and other sources, packed and driven by volunteers to FL. FHM's Executive Director, Kathy Walmer, and Dr. Delson Merisier, FHM's ob/gyn in Leogane also landed on this "air strip."
Read more about the proposed hospital complex.
DAY TWO - MEDICAL RELIEF AT THE BLANCHARD CLINIC
(From a phone conversation with Kathy Walmer on Monday, 1 February, at 4:00 pm)
We received a brief report from Kathy Walmer, Executive Director of Family Health Ministries, when she was between patients at the Blanchard Clinic on Monday afternoon. The FHM team of 16 are seeing huge number of patients, setting records for the number seen by an FHM medical team in one day.
Many of the patients are children, many with intestinal upsets, not surprising, considering what they've been through. Although the six providers are still seeing lots of orthopedic cases, as on the first day of the clinic, they are noticing a continuing shift from emergency care into primary care.
Kathy will send another email Monday evening with more details.
