I actually left Haiti about 1:30 pm on Tuesday January 12…the day the quake hit.  It was a normal day.  By the time I arrived in the Miami airport, news had broken of the quake and it was all over the CNN channels at the airport.  I spoke to a Haitian airport employee who was desperately trying to connect with her family in Haiti to learn if they were alive…but to no avail…the circuits were down.  Our two sons were also in Haiti visiting friends…I shared her fear…not knowing if they were OK.  I spoke by phone with Sandy…who was relieved to know I was OK.  But our hearts ached for what we knew our Haitian colleagues and friends would be going through.  

On Wednesday January 13, I returned to my clinic at the Oakville Health Centre ….trying hard to concentrate but finding it impossible to take my mind off of the tragedy unfolding in Haiti.  Ultimately, by the end of the week I had decided I must return to Port-au-Prince to work with Haitian medical colleagues there to assess the damage to our children’s hospital, our staff and our outreach/community health projects and at the same time, mount a strategy for using our facilities and staff to respond to the human disaster that seemed to be growing by the day.

Words cannot adequately describe the magnitude of devastation and destruction that I saw driving the streets of Port-au-Prince….(We will never truly know how many lost their lives, in part because there are no accurate census data to know how many lived in the affected areas pre quake.)  Building after building in varying degrees of damage and destruction…many completely flattened…walls scarred and cracked to the point where they are nothing more than partially standing death traps. By the time I arrived, most of the dead had been picked up (though not all).  There is something incredibly repugnant and disturbing about seeing the bodies of victims who, days later, had not yet been picked up by family or friends, the dead who will know no fitting burial or memorial.

I toured our Grace Children’s Hospital. Following an assessment by an engineering firm, it looks like much of it will need to be rebuilt…the infrastructure too damaged to safely renovate and reinforce.  The children are being cared for now in tents and under suspended tarps out in the hospital yard due to the fact that the inpatient areas are no longer safe for either the children or the staff caring for them.  

I then met with our staff in the hospital yard, many too afraid to go into even the buildings that we had assessed as still being structurally sound.  We have managed to account for 80% of the roughly 300 staff that live and work in the quake affected areas.  The others we are hoping fled to the countryside and are still alive.   As I looked into the eyes of our staff…physicians, nurses, aides, accountants, support staff, lab techs, …the pain was palpable. Collectively they were counting their losses.  Many had not slept for nights.  Many had no-where left to sleep...  

I drove across town to visit the office of the National TB program, an office where I had attended a meeting just 10 days earlier.  I arrived to find Richard, the Director and several of his staff standing outside a building that had all but completely collapsed.  Miraculously, no one had been killed.  Boxes of TB medications were strewn across the yard…They were picking through the rubble trying to salvage as much data, equipment, drugs and supplies possible... 

I made a stop in a neighbourhood where there was an orphanage that had been damaged.  I did the best I could to debride and dress some wounds, administered some analgesics for pain as well as antibiotics, but with a distinct feeling that more than one of those I saw could well loose all or a part of a limb to gangrene and/or infection.  My mind could not help but flash back to how differently these folks would be managed in Canada. In fact, in the very early days post quake common injuries included broken bones and open wounds.  Now, as time goes on, more amputations are being done in a desperate effort to save lives from infections out of control or limbs that are no longer viable. Heartbreaking!  

Beyond the physical destruction…bricks and mortar…as time passed, I came to more fully see the emotional and psychological trauma that our staff, colleagues and friends are going through.  Many cannot sleep at night.  Many have not yet gone back in their homes.  Symptoms of post traumatic stress are less obvious than broken bones and open wounds…but every bit as real and powerful. 

One night…for just a second I began to feel sorry for myself…and then my mind flashed back to the faces of the people I had met that day.  Yet there was something else I saw…and I have, over many years of involvement with Haiti seen this before…In the midst of all of this destruction people were beginning to move around again.  The strength and resilience of the Haitian people has never ceased to amaze me…tremendous courage in the face of incredible odds…they press on.  This courage, this stubborn resilience is probably one of the biggest assets in moving forward. 

What are some of the needs moving forward? 

For us as an organization…for our work in Haiti, we must first try to care for the immediate needs of our staff…many of whom have lost family, friends, homes, etc.  At the same time, we are moving now to try to get our clinics up and running again just soon as possible in order to continue to provide health care to those who now need it more than ever… And then we will need to demolish and rebuild.  Our vision is to see a new children’s hospital rise out of this rubble…a testament to those who lost life and to all who have gone before in service through this facility.

There is a beautiful Creole proverb that states:  “Anpil min, chay pa lou”, many hands, the load is not heavy.