Posted by 
Port-au-Prince – January 29, 2010. Hatians continue to seek help in their desperate situations. Villagers at a nearby orphanage need everything as well. The Haitian-run orphanage housed 30 children before the earthquake. A 10-year-old handicapped girl died when the structure collapsed. Franklin Marceus, who lives in the village, leads the way down a rubble-strewn road to show where the children live now: a series of tattered tents on a small patch of treeless land in the searing sun. Nearby, a woman cooks rice for the two dozen children in a small pot over an open fire. With nearly every home in the village destroyed or severely damaged, families can barely care for themselves. What will happen to the orphans? “We really don’t know,” says Marceus.
Further west in the town of Petit Goave, at least 500 people are dead and hundreds homeless. Under the shade of a few trees, a group of local pastors meet to discuss the need for clean water. As they meet, mangos plunk to the ground, shaken off a tree by a mild aftershock. These frequent aftershocks mean most people in this area—and all over Port-au-Prince—sleep outside, unsure if intact houses are safe to inhabit, compounding the problem of widespread homelessness.
After the meeting, I talk with Gedeon Sanon about what his community needs, but the pastor of a local Apostolic church is already thinking long-term: “The best way for people to help us is to help us do things for ourselves.”
Sanon is director of a local group called Haitian Foundation for Assistance and Safe Development of People, a Haitian-run organization aiming to establish educational and agricultural projects for nationals. Before the quake, the group had a 20-year plan. Now they’re starting from scratch. But Sanon says the organization’s principles of a biblically based work ethic and just government remain the same. And he worries that poorly planned international aid could lead Haitians to rebuild the same problems that have kept them poverty-stricken for 200 years. “We’ve been receiving outside help for a long time, and things are only worse,” he says. “If we can do it, we should do it ourselves.”
Sanon, who fled a volatile Haiti with his family in 1990, says his mother calls him “a son of promise.” “She promised God if He would spare our lives, she would dedicate me to His service,” he says. That’s why the pastor returned to Haiti eight years later. “If I am a son of promise, I have to go back,” he told his mother. “I have to help the people, and I know the Lord will help me.”
Charles Amicy is a son of promise too. The Haitian pastor and founder of Presbyterian Mission in Haiti (PMH), just north of Port-au-Prince in Cabaret, attended Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in South Carolina but returned to Haiti to serve his country with the gospel. His small compound includes a church, a school for 500 children, and an orphanage for 12.
These days the focal point of the compound is the makeshift clinic where Guillaume, the injured and bereaved mother of three, is seeking treatment. When I visited 11 days after the quake, three volunteer doctors and two nurses from Flying Doctors of America—a group that sends medical personnel into remote areas—were treating nearly 20 patients sprawled on twin mattresses on the cement floor of the church.
The injuries were grim: amputated legs, amputated arms, broken femur bones, severe flesh wounds. Though the doctors could manage the patient load, they were running low on critical supplies, partly because donated items from different countries didn’t fit together. In one case, doctors rigged a catheter for an 11-year-old girl by duct taping together a Belgian tube and a German tube, and draining it into an open vegetable oil jug.
In another case, the doctors performed a painful procedure without anesthesia on a malnourished and dehydrated 6-year-old boy who was near death when he arrived at the clinic. Desperate to find an elusive vein for an I.V., they drove a needle through the bone in his tiny leg, cut an incision near the back of his bony foot, and finally went through a major vein in his neck as the lethargic child whimpered in pain. Nothing worked.
After two agonizing hours, a fresh group of doctors arrived at the compound with a simple remedy the clinic lacked: Pedialyte. With a tube running through his nose and down his throat, the small boy appeared to process the fluid, but his long-term prognosis remained tenuous.
The long-term prognosis remains tenuous for other patients as well. Most have come here from hospitals in Port-au-Prince on pastor Amicy’s white school bus. The pastor drives doctors to hospitals in the city to pick up patients who need urgent care for serious wounds. In many cases, overloaded hospitals discharge such patients with nowhere to go. But many of the patients arrive at the PMH clinic still needing skin grafts or surgery for broken femurs and other wounds. Though a U.S. Navy helicopter evacuated six critical children, more remain with serious needs. When the doctors take patients to other hospitals in the capital to seek surgery, they say they are usually turned away.
One of the volunteer doctors, Jim Tierney, a pulmonologist from Boston, worries that more patients here and in similar clinics all over the city will die from complications like blood clots that are normally preventable: “It’s a simple injection, twice a day, that takes three minutes,” he says. “But we don’t have it.” Within 12 hours of my arrival at the clinic, two patients had died, possibly from blood clots.
On a bright Sunday morning, the doctors wrapped one of those patients in a white sheet and carried her to the back of the compound until a local morgue could retrieve her body. A woman next to her with a similar injury wailed, fearing a similar fate. More wailing would come with the difficult task that each morning at the clinic brings: dressing changes.
As doctors peeled away layers of gauze, some patients shouted and cried in pain. A boy with an open foot wound grimaced as doctors cleaned an area with two bones sticking out. Another woman’s open wound at the bottom of an amputated leg revealed a protruding bone. A 13-year-old girl suffered a face laceration that had ripped off her ear and damaged a major nerve.
As the painful work went on, members of the local congregation lined up benches next to the church so patients could hear the worship service through the open doors and windows. As the church service began, a new sound swallowed the cries and wails in the clinic: the patients singing hymns with the outdoor congregation.
Some lifted amputated limbs in the air, and the Creole singing reverberated off the concrete walls: “The only friend I have is God/This friend always knows my trouble/His love always comforts me/His hand always dries my tears/Sweet Jesus/Sweet Jesus.”
Though the clinic will eventually close, Amicy says he is preparing for construction projects and a new wave of orphans. The UN estimates thousands of children have lost one or more parents, or are separated from their families. “The people of Haiti know suffering. They grew up in it. They are going to die in it with no hope at all because nobody seems to care for them,” he says. “We will care for them.”
After the church service, members of the congregation visited patients, and doctors cared for Guillaume, helping her move outside. As she leaned on crutches with her amputated leg, a small group outside sang a different song: “Every step I take, Jesus will help me.”
Though the work is indescribably hard, Amicy describes the scene in the hospital as a picture of how Christ cares for broken souls. He is glad his church can provide such a ministry. “We wanted to preach the gospel to Port-au-Prince,” he says. “But we never expected this.”
World Magazine
