Providing Medical Relief

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

After eight days spent providing medical relief in Haiti, the team of doctors and nurses sponsored by Latter–day Saint Charities prepares to head home. This was the first major medical effort sent into a disaster area. What also made this team unique was that half of the volunteers were able to speak either Haitian Creole or French. For everyone involved, it was a life-changing experience.

After a delay in Miami and a bumpy ride from Santo Domingo, the medical team finally arrived in Port–Au–Prince on January 19. The team was eager to begin work and set up a temporary clinic in an LDS meetinghouse. They also worked closely with the Sacred Heart Central Hospital, which was just around the corner. They treated a range of injuries, from third–degree burns to fractures and infected limbs. Mark Rampton, a doctor from Corvallis, Oregon, recounts, “The amount of injury, physical displacement, loss of job, loss of home, loss of family, and loss of life is something beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”

Conditions at hospitals were beyond what anyone anticipated. Patients were being delivered in wheelbarrows and carried atop house doors, with lines snaking around the hospital courtyard and outside its wall. Treatments and surgeries also were taking place in the hallways. LDS volunteers helped where they could. A pair of LDS doctors working at the Centrale LDS meetinghouse, Mark Rampton and a fellow volunteer, Jeremy Booth, were helping to take a patient who needed critical care to Sacred Heart. Just as they were delivering the patient, they heard a woman scream, and Rampton aided the pregnant woman in the birth of a baby girl on the floor of the hospital hallway. “You can work 24 hours a day and still feel like you've only scratched the surface,” Rampton said.

But despite the despair they were surrounded by during their stay in Haiti, volunteers were overwhelmingly positive about their experience. “The Haitian people are sensitive," Dan Egan, a medical volunteer, said. “They're a very strong, polite people.” And while the medical team gave Haitians hope for survival, one member of the team gave a different perspective. Summing up his experience in Haiti, Ray Price said, “The things I've seen from the people of Haiti give me hope for humanity.”

The team treated over 500 people during their stay in Haiti. A smaller team of doctors will leave next week to continue to provide relief to the suffering in Haiti.

Material taken from:
Deseret News, Article 1
Deseret News, Article 2