Jan 20th

I awakened this am to someone shaking my bed violently. I opened my eyes and looked down at the foot of my mattress as it slid back and forth. A 6.1 aftershock which unfortunately didn’t cause any more damage in town. We are staying in Bon Repos in a nice house out on the plain away from Port-au-Prince. They have a generator and if you are reading this then the internet is working. It is a nice place but with traffic, it takes an hour and a half to get into the Central chapel where we have decided to hold our clinic. One of our trauma surgeons and our orthopedist left on a helicopter right after breakfast. Leogane, a small town south of PAP was hit hard. We heard that one of the surgeons was doing amputations without anesthetic. As of 11:30 tonight, they are still not back. Our other surgeons and trauma nurse went to the Sacre Coeur hospital where they worked hard all day. They are running out of pins, screws, and even sterile gowns. They fixed a homeless, parentless 13 year old boy’s tibia fracture today and will go after his crushed femur tomorrow. I presume he is out on the lawn waiting with the other patients for the sun to come up and the doctors to come back. Even in such trying circumstances I’m sure our docs and all the docs working there from dawn until dusk will do a good job for him. It’s what they are trained to do. I worry about what will happen to him after he gets the medical care he needs. What will happen to him then? Haiti’s social services are overwhelmed in even the best of times. Who will take care of him? More and more it seems like whether you live or die in Haiti is all just a cruel game of chance.

After dropping the other docs off at our clinic, we drove up the mountain to the Healing Hands compound. I hesitated going in, even knowing what I would find. It was terrible. Everything is gone, the school, the prosthetic shop, the clinic and our apartments. We walked down the drive and heard a steady chop, chop and the clang of metal against metal. The son of the poor woman who was buried in her apartment had hired 4 or 5 guys to try and dig her out. All they could round up were a few hammers and their own strength, no picks, no sledge hammers, no heavy equipment. I’m not sure they will ever get her body out.

A bright spot in all the sadness—Jean is alive! He showed up at the compound today! He was on the 6^th floor of his school when the quake happened. Fortune must have smiled on him as he was by the window. He jumped out as the building began to fall. Of the 30 people in his class only 5 survived. Jean’s leg was injured but not seriously. It was so nice to see his large bright smile.

We walked around the compound and I took some pictures. Some of the staff’s family are homeless and have set up a tent on the grass under the tall mahogany and palm trees. It would be a good place to camp if they were camping. I would hate to be there in the first big rainstorm however.

We drove up to the Petionville chapel in the afternoon. It’s grounds are covered with people. They hadn’t eaten anything since Tuesday morning and they were hungry. Everyone cheered when the 82^nd Airborne arrived with an entire truckload of water, and meals. The men quickly formed a line, unloaded the truck and stacked the supplies in the chapel. It made me feel proud to be an American. One of the soldiers said, “if this was Iraq, it would be the women doing the unloading”. I’m glad we use our forces for relief as well fighting.

I helped transport an eleven year old girl to a French clinic in Petionville this evening. They had an awning up in the street and we lay her down in the middle of the street. She was frightened, so we went back to the chapel and brought her grandfather down to stay with her. A French team was using a private plastic surgery center as a makeshift trauma unit with their triage on the street and the sidewalks. The cooperation that exists here is amazing. Everyone is sharing what they have, helping out when they can, and doing their best to ease the suffering. It’s just enough to give one a little bit of hope for the future.