A Place in Port Au Prince

Hi, all!

I got into Port Au Prince 2 days ago. Things are okay here. It's hard to say "good" in light of a 7.0 earthquake and the devastation that follows, but it's a much better situation for us than I had imagined. 

Things are getting better on the streets... Things are slowly getting cleaned up. There are no more piles of bodies in the street, nor bodies lined up outside of houses for identification, like we had heard reports of earlier last week. There are still dead trapped in houses, which you can identify by the stench. Everyone walks around with a mask on. 

But we have felt very safe. We're staying at Carl and Maya's. We gathered good information from the US Embassy that if we show up at the Embassy and ask to be evacuated, they will. That's a nice thing to know just in case. 

We drove through several places in the city today on our way to clinic. Many buildings have pancaked down, but they have cleared the rubble out of the road. There are white people, relief workers and UN, in soooo many places! This is the safest I've ever felt in Port before. Part of it is probably because I'm with a big group of white people and since I speak more Creole now, but the people are also very subdued.

Today, we saw people out walking around doing normal looking things. Some of the markets are open. Several gas stations are open with long lines.

We set up a clinic in Carfoufe yesterday. Our largest Wesleyan church is there, some of it is still standing. That area was very hard hit. We had the clinic in a classroom in the Wesleyan school. We had a bunch of help from people in the church, and they were wonderful!!

The sickest patients showed up for the first few hours. Probably the worst was a girl with a broken femur and broken wrist. Mainly, we cleaned wounds and splinted broken bones. We saw about 100 patients all together. Dr. Kris Thede, one of our missionary docs from the north of Haiti, joined our group yesterday morning, and it was so good to see her! Mis Viro, the Haitian nurse practicioner that I worked with in the hospital on LaGonave, has been here at Carl's, so she came with us too. It was good.

We did a lot of wound debridement, and gangrene is already starting to set in just a little. I spent 30 minutes carefully cleaning a wound and removing the nonviable tissue on one young guy. A piece of his house fell on this ankle where the wound was. His parents and all 3 of his siblings died as the house came down. He alone escaped and is now homeless. He was so brave while I cleaned him up with no anestehtic. We talked for a little while about how God has a plan for him, as he alone was spared, and also how he came for medical treatment at a critical time. Hopefully, with debridement and antibiotics, he will live to tell his story.

Much love, and I just wanted to report on what we're up to. We finished our clinic an hour earlier than planned since we ran out of patients, so we're hoping to link up with Bobby Boyer, a family friend from back in SC who pastors a church here, today and see if we can help out in their clinic. Dr. Kris also suggested that we get in touch with other Wesleyan churches and see if they need clinics there like we did today. We'll see what tomorrow holds.

Thanks for your prayers,

~diane