Hope in Haiti

The TJMS' spring break was a time of service.  My crew - Sybil, Nikki Woods, Mary Boyce, my wife, Donna, and seven others - flew to Haiti to volunteer at country’s only hospital run by Project Medishare. It was an experience of a lifetime. Seeing it first-hand is the only thing that allows you fully comprehend what happened, what’s needed and why they have such a long journey ahead of them. 
 
 

DAY ONE
 

Arrived in Haiti, went straight to hospital/tents and took a tour of the facility.  After that, we went on a tour of the downtown area. Such devastation - and that was 40 miles away from the epicenter! But people have moved on with their lives. No one seems to be dwelling on the disaster. They are real survivors. The people, patients and doctors seem so upbeat, in spite of the circumstance. But we didn’t come here to look; we came here to work. Tomorrow morning, we start our first 12-hour shift in the hospital.
 
 

DAY TWO
 

We walked in the tent that was designated to house medical supplies. It was about 95 degrees, dusty and full of aisles with shelves made of plywood. There was a lot of stuff on the shelves and just as much stuff in boxes that lined each aisle, and lots of hot sweaty people waiting for us to come in there and straighten things out.  We were game. That’s what we’d come to do. 

Sybil and senior producer Nikki, the best multi-taskers in the group, were assigned to logistics that included computer work, filing, drawing maps and cleaning the refrigerator of the triage unit. But we were hoping to come into the supply room and get it together so that when we left, you knew someone had come in and made a difference.

But here was the problem. Not only were there too many supplies and not a good system in place; not everyone there was even following the wack system that they had. There were a lot of mini-systems. Plus, people were tired and hot  and had been there for a week. We had just gotten there, so we were excited to do good work.

Yes, we took a lot of breaks; yes, we lost one soldier to dehydration and talked about her real bad, but when we left the site for lunch and returned, someone said, “We didn’t think you were coming back.” They thought we were there for a photo-op or just to say we had come; it wasn’t like that at all. But at the end of the day, I realized that although we made some progress, the problem was much bigger than the mess that existed inside that tent. The real problem was communication between people who were sending supplies and the people who know what supplies are really needed. There was way too much stuff that would probably never be unpacked or would be thrown away because it was useless –like opened sterile bandages and expired medication or just items that were unidentifiable. That is a waste of money, space and time because the only way it can be determined unusable is for someone to go through it first.
 

There were so many items doctors and nurses really needed to treat patients right away.  Some of them were properly shelved and easy to find, but a lot of them were anybody’s guess, and that was the hardest part. 

So many people, like us, want to do something, but you have to make sure not only that what you’re doing counts, but that .....