Haiti, Day One

So many people have asked about Haiti and I have wanted to get it all in writing, so I thought I would try to post a blog each day this week and recount each day of the one week I was in Haiti. So, now, offset by two weeks, here's what happened and what I experienced.
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About four weeks ago, my dad was asked by a friend he worked with at the White House (in the 70’s) to help organize a trip to Haiti. It was called the Utah Hospital Task Force and consisted of medical professionals, construction specialists and missionaries who had served in Haiti to work as translators and cultural ambassadors. All going would be members of the LDS (Mormon) Church and many were from Utah. I was planning on taking a vacation in February anyway, and it seemed like a perfect alternative to the usual relaxing time off. Instead of resting and recuperating, I would get to do something much more worthwhile. It was a rare opportunity to serve alongside my Dad and brother, Mike. Mike is a police officer in San Jose, CA, and would be helping with security for our group.

Politically, I'm not a fan of the UN, but I sure was grateful for their free flight to get from Santo Domingo to Port Au Prince.

It didn’t look like it was going to work out since they were going for 3 weeks and it is completely impossible to be gone for even one hour past the allotted time off during residency, especially since I am one of the junior residents and lower on the totem pole. The chartered plane left without me on it. However, after the group was there for two days, they figured out a way I could go for only a week.

On such short notice, it was very hard to figure out how to organize coverage for my responsibilities and I was not going to be able to go. However, my fellow residents rallied to help me out and were able to cover everything. Special thanks to Owen Ala for covering the weekend call (a HUGE job) after calling from Haiti to ask him. It was very last minute and he sacrificed a lot to work that entire weekend for me.

It was a huge scramble to pack and get everything ready on such short notice. I didn’t have everything together since I though it was going to be impossible to go. However, the plan my dad worked out was to have me fly a Delta flight to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, then take a United Nations 7-seater jumper, specifically for flying in medical professionals, over to Port Au Prince, Haiti.

Surprisingly, we were able to find a flight to the DR relatively cheap ($350!) for only having a few hours notice. I threw everything I thought I would need into an internal frame pack, prescribed myself a couple of needed vaccinations and anti-malaria pills. I barely even made the flight and they luckily held it 4 minutes just for little old me.

The flight to Santo Domingo was uneventful, aside from finally getting time to self-administer my two vaccinations in an airport bathroom. I’m sure that would have looked suspicious to anyone who observed not knowing what I was really doing!

In Santo Domingo, I noticed how nice everything was. I had obviously never been there and I thought it would be similar to Haiti since they share the island. Everything seemed to be working as usual in the country. I took a taxi to another smaller airport 30 minutes away and felt comfortable speaking Spanish, knowing that soon that comfort would be completely gone. I asked the taxi driver why nothing of such magnitude happens in the DR, but happens so often in Haiti. He said he didn’t know why, but it’s obvious they at least have very bad luck. He also talked about how maybe their government, which he thinks is very corrupt, has been cheating the citizens of what they need to be protected from such disasters.

At the smaller airport, I waited four hours and made sure my name was on the manifest for the United Nations free flight. I had emailed them 24 hours before and was relieved to see my name on a white board thousands of miles from home. A small comfort among so much uncertainty and flying by the seat of my pants, literally.

It was an experience in itself to fly a tiny plane over the island nations of the DR and Haiti before arriving at Port Au Prince. It is beautiful country and there is no visible reason from high up in the air as to why one half of this island is seemingly so cursed and the other so prosperous and stable.

The second big relief of the day was to see my Dad and an old friend of Bri’s (small world) Dave Studdert waiting for me when I got off the little UN plane in Port Au Prince, Haiti. Never in a million years did I think I was going to be there, for any reason, let alone to try to help with what little orthopaedic surgery knowledge I have at this time of so much need.

You can see the trucks the 82nd Airborne ferried us around in behind our tents. It was nice to be sitting at about 8 feet off the street, making us difficult targets for random acts of anything.

We took a Tap-Tap (tiny pickup truck with benches bolted to the sides of the bed) 4 miles to the camp. The camp where we stayed was a converted soccer field that happened to have a wall the entire way around it. That made it much safer, and the reason it was chosen to be one of the outposts for the 82^nd Airborne. We were lucky to be able to be guests in their camp and enjoy their security and transport trucks.

A panoramic of the entire camp. The military has the left side with the large tents. We had all the small tents with one larger supply tent. This camp was first built by an Israeli medical group that came completely self-contained. They were known as having done a lot of good in a short period 5of time.

By the time I arrived, the day was winding down, so I was not able to do anything productive besides set up my tent and bust out an MRE (the first of many). There are good MREs and there are bad MREs. We had the bad ones. Nevertheless, it was easy to be grateful to have any food at all when so many around you were suffering in so many ways.

One thing I noticed when we drove through the city was that there were not just people sitting around with their hands out, waiting for someone to hand them something to eat or drink. People were going about their daily business. Sure, every single building was deserted since few Haitians feel comfortable inside any kind of building at all and about one third of buildings were completely destroyed, one third were cracked and precarious, and the last third were just empty from lack of trust of the people. Besides the fact that few buildings had people in them, it seemed like people were still living life. If they sold fruit in the street, they were out selling their fruit. If they were the guy who fixes flat moped tires, they were doing their thing. People still tried to keep things going amidst the rubble and occasional stench of decaying bodies.

Those black water barrels were our wonderful "showers." It was basically a spigot at about waist level with a trickle you could clean yourself with. No matter how unpleasant that sounds, you would be amazed at how refreshed you feel after one of these showers compared to the sticky, sweaty, dirty tired feeling you've been working up all day.

One thing none of my pictures will convey is how hot it is there. It’s hard to put yourself in that state of mind since it has been so cold here lately, but the heat and humidity are crippling. More about that later. Just remember to insert the caption “we were uncomfortably hot and nasty sweaty, and this is what we were doing...” in front of every picture I post.

If I am successful, I will do a post each day this week and try to parallel each day there. I am trying to catch up in many ways with my residency responsibilities and make up for time taken off, so I may just have to end up getting very little sleep this week. Not that this would be anything out of the ordinary.