Haiti Earthquake Relief: Help

The Haitians that know how to write jot down their prayers and cries for help. They place these in an empty water jug that looks like it has been dry for too long. The jug sits in the middle of an unfinished and crumbling sanctuary that should have stood three stories tall and should have been built to metaphorically burst with the shouts of sermons and the reverberations of a community coming together in choir. Where will these prayers go? What will happen to that water jug?

How do families handle the still missing loved ones? Do survivors consider the missing ones as buried in rubble or as buried in the communal graves?

Why do we bother putting estimates like 100,000 fatalities when we only overturn them for double that amount two weeks later? When will the estimates stop rising?

Do the impending deaths in displaced person camps during the rainy season fall into the death toll for the earthquake?

Haiti has never been known to have a strong sense of leadership. Recently, many articles and blog-posts have been written expressing socio-political solutions for Haiti. I have read about how Haiti's debts need to be forgiven; furthermore, the world (read "The West") is in debt to Haiti for slavery, coups, deforestation, and the general destruction of the socio-economic viability of the nation.

But beyond the economic situation, Haiti is desperate for a leader who is just uncorrupted enough to symbolize stability, vision, solidarity, and strength. Based on opinions on the ground, Rene Preval is not that man. The Haitian president was widely criticized for coming into the limelight to deliver a public message far too late after the quake: “He made us focus on the dead, how much we have lost and what sorry shape this country is in...And he interrupted us right in the middle of our own prayer service, which was actually joyous.”

But Haitians are still uniting. Typically this unity and this strength in solidarity happens in faith-based communities. There is buzz around JR Bataille, a pastor and an articulate US University alum who is writing a position paper for the United Nations on how to rebuild a more sustainable Port-au-Prince.

P-a-P, Haiti, and the Haitians need optimistic and ambitious visionaries with pragmatic conceptions of how to proceed. Leaders with knowledge (of how to proceed sustainably and about living as a Haitian) need to assume leadership positions--regardless of whether these positions are political or not. And these leaders are doing so. These are the leaders that need international support as liaisons: These leaders need to demand sustained support in at least the strength (if not stronger) that the initial earthquake response elicited.

These leaders need to continue sponsoring youth development in a country with a suddenly diminished capacity to serve their own future.

These leaders need to continue the strictly supervised distribution of resources to the women, children, and families that need food, water, and shelter. Something needs to happen to ensure that 55 tons of rice that can create over 300,000 meals does not slip into the black market.

Haiti has the spirit and strength in its peoples to create a responsible nation. Even if leaders (like the Batailles) struggle to monitor every facet of being a liaison between international support and local communities, there are educated individuals with the heart to help their own people.

After a long day of transporting patients to different hospitals around P-a-P and reallocating baby formula to hospitals surrounded by thousands of starving tent city dwellers, a dehydrated and exhausted translator expects nothing more than a bottle of water, a handful of beef jerky, and a picture. He draws a doodle in my personal journal: Though it looks like any stick figure, he labels it as "Ron" (his name). He does not ask for my contact information in the ominous or guilt-inducing way that many contacts in "developing countries" would so that they can work on their escape routes. He is proud to be a Haitian helping other Haitians he knows, loves, and lives with.

And we need to continue pressuring our leaders to support the recovery, rebuilding, and restructuring of a more sustainable, livable, and healthy Haiti.

We need to continue enduring the difficulties of traveling to P-a-P because we have the knowledge that every day of delay compares not to every minute of hands-on help we can offer.

We must work with Haitians and not for them.

Though our team, donned in scrubs, worked to serve a specific, specialized need amongst the Haitians, no one needed a degree to understand how to move baby formula, organize patient flow, or even understand the basics of triage.

Just because you do not have a degree does not mean that you will not be able to help with recovery. Haiti will need childcare workers, teachers, movers, organizers, supporters, hand-holders, idea-generators, innovators, frugal initiative takers, etc.

But adjusting standards of living is not so easy.

And I am not entirely sure about how to treat my experience in Haiti. How am I to do the people justice? How am I to pay adequate tribute? How am I to incorporate the knowledge of the tragedies in P-a-P into my life? 

I am not sure, really, what to take from our team's experience. I find myself feeling so pessimistic about the dire situation in P-a-P: The Haitians were in a tough spot before the quake, and now they are facing what seem to be insurmountable obstacles--economically, politically, health-wise, community-wise, on an infrastructural level, etc. I tell stories and praise the impressive University of Miami hospital and the strength and graciousness of the Haitian people, but I find I always return to the tragic elements that I witnessed:

Divided families

Homelessness

Displacement

Misdirection

Futility

Filth

Disease

Insufficient support

Inadequate relief

Disorganized relief

Reduction in relief workers (by the time we left)

Fading of media coverage

Hunger

Destruction

Lack of leadership

And so on. I go about my daily life conscious of the experience but always wondering what I am supposed to take from it, what I am to learn, how I am to integrate Haiti into my life. 

I do not have a link to a website or a cause that you should support with direct intent of donating to Haiti.

Go.

Help fix the mess.

Even if you are like me and without any specialized training, there is a storage facility at a hospital that needs your help with organizing so that the doctors do not waste five minutes looking for a specific size scalpel while a patient waits in pain. There is no good reason why the tons of donated food in that storage facility is rotting in the sun.

I met a 22-year-old Harvard alum who was starting an N.G.O. with the aim of assisting community centers in creating child development courses (e.g. art, karate, dance, soccer, etc.) during and after earthquake recovery.

I met two young men who started an N.G.O. with the aim of scouting out communities that had yet to receive aid, the aim of finding aid and relief workers, and the aim of connecting the two.

And I met a 26-year-old college drop-out who spent his days struggling to learn Haitian Creole while he drove trucks around P-a-P pursuing rumors of water and food aid so that he could claim it for a particular orphanage.

There are still buildings down throughout P-a-P, and I can only imagine what the rest of the country looks like. A man swinging a pickaxe at a fallen slab of concrete catches his son's head on the back-swing; though the child retains the majority of his motor functions, his father now has another emotional burden and physical restriction to uncovering whatever is underneath that concrete slab.

Find a way to get there.

Here was mine.

And just because Haiti is not the news' top story and just because many relief workers are returning (if not returned) does not mean the country does not remain cracked and broken.

Haiti Earthquake Relief: Commemoration, Faces, Health

While we were in Haiti, the first days of public markets since the earthquake began. Some praised how "commerce" had resumed; if you call thousands of heads of rotting lettuce deluged in the smell of feces "commerce," then, yes, "commerce" had resumed. 

Regardless of the conditions under which Haitians were resuming their markets, the fact that the Haitians were doing what they could to continue their livelihoods was undoubtedly uplifting.

Still, the national dish of Haiti seemed to be rice and beans. While staying at a church run by pastors named Bataille, we enjoyed a daily meal of rice and beans with the members of the congregation. Pockets within Port-au-Prince course with an undeniable sense of community. While news reports about looting and civil disruption had amplified my paranoia before arriving in P-a-P, I quickly came to appreciate the unifying forces in Haiti: a common will to recover, a desperation to survive, and a need for community interaction. Often times, these unifying forces prevailed because of faith-based communities.

Father Bataille has reportedly sent over 25 children to universities and colleges--only a small fraction of these being his own kin and the remainder being members of his congregation. He shelters displaced families in the church's walled compound, and he offers the church's grounds as a station for United Nations food distribution. He is active in organizing relief based at his church. 

For three days, this relief included our team; we camped in tents, in the church's yard, next to the displaced families, leashed goats, and dysfunctional roosters that cock-a-doodled every five minutes starting at 2 a.m. The communal toilets had the flushing handles removed to preserve what little water was supplied to the church. But, many echoed: "At least there are toilets."

And that seems to be one of the motifs resonating in Haitian minds: "at least." They embrace what they still have, and, as I mentioned in the last post, they may even have a tragically heightened awareness to what truly matters in life: family, friends, love, survival, faith, community, etc. 

After a day assisting with a pharmacy for a medical clinic run out of an alley behind a cracked-but-survived orphanage, our team returns to the Bataille's church during a memorial service for the congregation members lost in the quake. Amongst the tents, a small children's orchestra of violins and recorders practice a piece for the service: "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem that echoes with tones of sorrow but translates to mean "The Hope."

Pastor Bataille's Creole shouts resonate out of the church--the church is roofless and was unfinished before the quake. The earthquake undoubtedly has cracked the church's walls without quite bringing down the community center that erupts with a solidarity backboned by faith. I am curious about what the pastor is shouting, but the fifty-or-fewer French words that I do know do nothing to decipher Haitian Creole.

And though I am tired from a physically trying and emotionally taxing day, I know well-and-good that I am not nearly as exhausted as the survivors grieving those they have lost, worrying about their homelessness, and contemplating their struggles for food and water. And, I know that I am not nearly as exhausted as the translators who follow our team each day and do all that I do but often do it twice: once in English for our team's sake, and once in Creole for the Haitian patients' sakes.

By the time our team arrives in Haiti (about fourteen days after the quake), most of the severe trauma (that our surgeon, our E.R. doc, and our nurses were preparing themselves to face) had already been treated. There were still a few patients with broken limbs and deep abrasions trickling into clinics and hospitals; these patients lacked access to emergency care or lacked the access to transportation to emergency care.

Being somewhat uneducated in local traditions and voodoo practices, I also speculate at whether a cultural justification has precluded individuals from seeking proper medical care.

The patients are gracious. They have no qualms about subjecting themselves to a privacy-compromised medical process. Whether at clinics in the communities or at hospitals, the vast influx of patients implies overcrowding and volunteers' improvisation to accommodate as many people in pain as possible. In an open-air and poorly curtained auditorium (probably a religious center), a man removes his pants for a doctor to inspect a severe intestinal hernia that has engorged his testicles; a woman hikes up her skirt to reveal puss in an abrasion the width of a pumpkin on the back of her thigh. These patients clearly understand that this medical setting is not suited for modesty.

The handful of translators abidingly respond to the doctors and nurses. An issue of not knowing how to express in Creole or in English never arises; the team is ever-thankful and praising of the translators. Still, translators occasionally "disappear" for much-needed breaks or to help with crowd control of the hundreds of Haitians who have flooded-in from their tent city  to wait on broiling benches for the opportunity to see these pale skinned foreigners who may or may not have the "cure" for a malady. 

One man creates a fuss in the clinic area because he wants the doctors to come to his half-crumbled house to pay a call to his family; with security threats and the inability to transport, no one on our team can accommodate--the translators tell the man to bring his family to the clinic, but we never see the man again.

My father, a surgeon on our team, points out a stark truth about the situation: "I always wonder what these patients must think. Despite what we bring, they must think: 'They get to leave.'" He means that we, Americans, are only amidst the chaotic suffering for but a brief week, two weeks, month, or however long until we can use our precious U.S. Passports to bring us back to our lives with roofs, central heating, and outlets in weather-proofed walls. 

Whether or not this actually crosses the minds of the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, uncles, or any other relative is unknown. But, the Haitian people all wait patiently for their chance to be seen for a severe injury, for intestinal worms, for diarrhea, or for a headache. The Haitian people tend to have stern facial expressions that imply mourning, fear, and anxiety.

Dehydration and hunger being the origin of most maladies, we run out of Pedialyte and Enfamil for kids within hours. We are told not to share what little water we have for fear of instigating a situation that could easily escalate into a riot amongst those who plead for water.

Unfortunately, the Haitian people must wait for help to come from somewhere. They are driven to help themselves, to rebuild, to preserve their strength of conviction. But the problems are so momentous that the Haitian graciousness needs to meet adequate and organized international support. Unfortunately, the earthquake response seems to be following a similar disaster relief pattern: too little relief too late is too disorganized. There is no central body registering what relief (private and governmental) goes where, and there is no central body creating a list of locational needs. Of course, this may be another development in what is already too beureaucratic of a relief process.

The times I find myself thinking about all the issues and all the obstructions to appropriate relief (including those outside of our control, like geography and time) are the only times that I find myself tearing-up about the tragedy in Haiti. Yesterday (2/11/2010) the first rains of the rainy season fell, promising a difficult battle to protect the displaced persons from inevitable mudslides, floods, and the onslaught of waterborne diseases. There is much to be done, still, and I fear the implications of the marginalization of news coverage.

What must the Haitian patients think when they are placed in a ward housed in a pop-up tent that shelters nearly 100 people at a time? It is void of privacy and there is constant foot-traffic in the narrow aisles: visitors carrying loved-ones' bedpans out of the tent and to wherever the disposal area is. Is there any dignity in these places? How terrifying must it be for these people to wake to a tube connected to their arms? Do they have an understanding of this process? Do they question the paler-skinned men and women wearing blue and claiming to have the answers? What do the patients think when they hear regular screams from compatriots who have never received a tetanus shot before or who just received an amputation a day earlier? Do they fear the doctors and nurses when "G-27," their bed number, is called to the wound care table for a procedure involving ketamine as anaesthesia and saline solution to irrigate a deep tissue wound? Do the patients have any idea what anaesthesia or tetanus are?

So few eyes reveal the answers to these questions. The Haitians generally remain stoic or smile appreciatively. But my heart brakes every time I hear a baby scream over the grinding from a plastering machine while his leg is being casted. And my heart breaks when I see that patient, one in every hundred, with fear in his or her eyes. That is why I can never become a doctor and why I will probably never become a nurse.

But the undeniable necessity for healthcare and human rights workers compels me to continue doing all that I can to help: to teardrop away from the flood that is the problems facing Haitians and others who suffer from marginalization, ignorance, and injustice only amplified by a tragically placed natural disaster.

Haiti Earthquake Relief: Travel, Adjustments, Destruction

At the moment, the ways into Port-au-Prince are by air (with the help of private charters) or by road (driving from the Dominican Republic). I am hard-pressed to imagine how a civilian (non-military) would get into P-a-P by boat or with the military; though, considering the unpredictability of each and every circumstance involving Haiti, anything is possible. 

Do not pay attention to anyone saying that getting out of Haiti is easier than getting in to Haiti. Getting out involves either gambling by going to the US-Military-controlled international airport and waiting for a military escort that may or may not be leaving at any given moment, accomodating an untold number of civilians, and travelling to an undisclosed location in the US (we heard destinations ranging from Orlando to Dallas to Puerto Rico). Otherwise, civilians can try forming connections or paying-ways onto private charters--this requires intense networking that is only obstructed by reduced communication and restricted on-the-ground transportation abilities. Lastly, a pricey charter or drive to the DR is always available. The latter route was our departure of choice.

The irony of the "expedite" labels on the medical supplies boxes is not lost on me. From Portland to P-a-P took me 5-6 days. Without delving into too many details that are mostly vague (because I still lack certain connections between dots about why we, as an International Medical Relief team, were delayed), I will recount certain obstructions:

-Unpredictable weather

-Heavy air traffic into P-a-P

-U.N. not lending its own airstrip to private relief flights

-U.S. Military beuracracy in running the P-a-P airport

-T.S.A. screening procedures (disorganized at best)

-Clearing oodles of medical supplies (e.g. syringes, antibiotics, sedatives for anesthesia, etc)

-Clearing extra, overweight baggage

Our team waited in JFK Airport in New York for over six hours before we discovered we were doomed to miss our flight. Two squads of EMT's from Bedford-Stuyvesant made our flight, but only in bits and pieces: one squad's leader did not make the flight, and the other squad's gear did not make the flight. A bunch of Scientology ministers made the flight. The two men sponsoring our private charter just barely made the flight. To make the slated landing time in P-a-P, the flight went wheels-up at noon. We were not on it; one of the charter sponsers called us mid-flight to let us know seventy seats on-board were unfilled.