Quake Stories, Part 2

As I prepared for a year of medical missions work in Haiti last November, I thought that what I was about to see was going to be bad. At the end of December, after 1/3 of the patients I had seen that month died, I realized that it was really bad. After the devastating 7.0 earthquake shook Port Au Prince, it was absolutely catastrophic.

In November, I tried to prepare for third world medicine by reading up on tropical diseases. In December, I began planning the implementation of a CME program to train and equip my Haitian coworkers in first world medicine so patients wouldn’t die of things that people don’t die from in America and so nurses would stop putting tongue depressors in the mouths of seizing patients. In January, I moved to Port to work in a disaster relief clinic.

A huge part of me wants to give you stories of hope after the quake... stories of life and love and the magnificent human spirit.
But I realized that I have been a little remiss... You also need to hear some of the horror and tragedy and heartbreak to receive a balanced picture of where I have been and what I have seen. Many of the news stories are true... stuff is bad. Horrific. Hellish. Heart-wrenching. 

Much of what you see on the news is true. Only worse. On the news, you don’t get a sense of the sights and smells. You can’t travel through Port, knowing from the stench which buildings still have dead bodies trapped under them. On the news, you don’t get to drive by the grocery store where you used to shop, realizing that the man who used to slice your cheese and teach you Creole is now trapped at his deli counter, crushed under 7 stories of concrete.

This is a tent city... it's now where people live. Even if a part of a house is still standing, many are not stable enough for people to live there again. And we're still experiencing aftershocks, so no one sleeps inside. Malaria and typhoid have less barriers as people live right next to one another and good water is scarce. The aftershocks still occur daily. You never feel completely safe... and you never sleep too deeply.

It looks like a bomb went off. So many buildings are crushed... Can you count the floors of this building? It had at least 5. 
Haitians usually wail when a loved one dies. It's a loud, haunting sound expressing deep hurt and anguish. I've only heard it once since the quake... The magnitude of death and destruction is so overwhelming that I'm not sure the grieving has even begun. 
Everyone lost someone. All of the people that I treated in the clinic also lost their homes. It's hard to wrap your brain and your heart around devastation on such a large scale. 

Our clinic was rough... Bare bones medical. You had to be creative and flexible to attempt to treat what came before you. Babies not eating because both their parents are dead. Everyone has a headache and a stomachache. Baby fingers that are black with gangrene and need to be removed. A strangulated hernia that needed surgery after a son lifted a cement wall off his mom only to find that she was already gone. New accidents, as a motorcycle driver gawks at the rubble and runs into a pedestrian. A little boy with an open head injury, grey matter peeking out, after he gets hit with a pick ax that was being used to dig bodies out of the rubble. 

We worked in an outdoor clinic, with tarps set up to catch mangoes and coconuts that fell with the aftershocks, attempting to not create more patients. Patients lined up by the hundreds every morning to be treated. Every morning, I had to scramble to get a small bucket of water to be able to splint fractures. Every morning, it was a quest to find a little bit of clean water to wash out wounds. 

This is the background stress of clinic work. After the first day, I had trouble asking each patient their story, as despair threatened to overwhelm me for the loss these sweet people have suffered.
Every patient had the same history. “A wall fell on me.” “This bulge (a strangulated hernia) showed up in my stomach after I lifted a wall off my mom, only to find out she was dead.” “I’m the only one left alive. I was in a hotel with 200 people for a conference.” 

The Lord told me that morning to slow down, to look at their faces and love them. A couple of days later, my interpreters (I found that I worked faster with using them and it was a good check for my Creole) told me that I was working “dousman,” a word that I knew to mean “slowly.” I was a little discouraged to hear that, but they quickly reassured me that I was not to change and that the people talked about me and loved me. The meaning of “dousman” that they meant was “sweetly” and “gently.” It was sweet for me to know that God can use a broken heart for His kingdom. I was able to pray with several patients, and all of those I treated received tracts.

My favorite patient was an 8 year old who showed up with a crushed injury. Her left hand and wrist had been smashed by a falling cement wall. She had a few scrapes that needed to be cleaned up and she stole a piece of my heart (I wonder if that's how moms feel when they put neosporin on boo-boo's). She has a great smile and a black eye, where debris had smacked her in the face. She was brave as I examined her hand for gangrene (none yet, thankfully!!) and scrubbed her scabs off to bandage her arm and then molded a sugar-tong splint into position. She came back for a recheck two days later, no signs of gangrene and arm healing so well! I whispered in her ear that I loved her and did she know that Jesus loves her, too? She smiled back at me, nodded, and gave me a huge one-armed hug! Her dad leaned over to tell me that she liked me, and also that she was going to the Dominican Republic the following day. My heart rejoiced that she could be headed somewhere safe, and I cautioned that she really needed x-rays. She gave me another hug and headed out, hopefully to safety. 
There is hope mingled into horror, healing in the midst of heartache.