Extremes of Emotion

Hello from Port au Prince. My experience thus far has been intense to say the least- including high, highs and low, lows.

I'm not sure how to sum up the trip thus far. . . .

We arrived safely in PAP after a 7+ hour bus ride from the Dominican Republic filled with adventure. I saw my first patient in the bus station in the DR- a little girl who's mother had died in the earthquake who sustained cuts and burns to her eye and arms. Thankfully her family had the means to bring her to the DR to seek medical care which had been adequate.

Our first full day in Port au Prince our friend Alex took us around to many different neighborhoods just to take in the destruction of the earthquake. It was so unbelievable to see buildings I remembered from my prior visits to Haiti completely leveled. One of the first buildings like this was "Our Little Brothers and Sisters" Children's Hospital in Pettionville. I had spent a month there after my first year of medical school taking care of many orphaned kids and others suffering from both acute and chronic illness. It was a ?4 story building before. Unfortunately after the earthquake it is literally a pile of rubble. If you were passing by you would think it was a construction sit of a building that was yet to be erected, no a hospital that once housed so many young children. When I saw that building, I think I finally began to understand what had happened in Haiti.

During our tour of the city, seeing the Presidential Palace and many other great structures in ruins was intense. Alex (our good friend and Haitian interpreter) has a daughter that was in a school that collapsed and somehow most of the kids made it out ok. It was quite disturbing to see the lifeless legs of one child sticking out from what once was the school- the body too burried for anyone without heavy lifting equiptment to make a rescue, and remains too trapped for a proper burrial.

While out walking one of the neighborhoods we were reminded "The flies, the black flies" meant there were bodies still burried under the fallen buildings. Worse yet, we saw the charred remains of bodies which had had tires placed on them and were burned because people couldn't handle the stench of rotting flesh. . .and workers were overwhelmed with picking up the bodies.


I'm unfortunately out of time to write but will thankfully have positive things to say in my next post- yesterday was a Haitian soap opera filled with lots of drama as we tried to set up our clinic. . .but today was a great success! We saw 90 patients today- many of whom who had been injured in the earthquake and now had infected wounds.

Keep praying for Haiti- that as CNN and other news outlets are no longer providing 24 hour coverage, that the many, many, many needs of this country don't once again become ignored.