Oxfam's Mark Fried has taken over where I left off. He posted an audio update from Haiti this morning.
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It was a relief to read the sign on the wall: no dead bodies after 3.30 pm. My watch showed it was 4pm. Thankfully, when I poked my head into the morgue at the Hôpital Universitē de l’Ētat de Haiti, also known as the General Hospital, the room was empty.
Outside, though, the ground was grimly sticky underfoot – a reminder of how many bodies had been taken to the public morgue for disposal since the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly two weeks ago.
I’d come to the public hospital, one of the largest in Haiti, to look at the work Oxfam had been doing there. My colleague, Karine Deniel, a public health specialist, focussing on preparedness and emergency response work, had been called to the hospital the week before.
She had been visibly shocked by what she saw: the hospital was packed with more than 1,000 patients, many of whom were surgery cases. There was no running water and no electricity.
Outside the morgue, she said, piles of bodies wree laid out covered with flies. There was no water close by for doctors to make plaster casts for those with broken limbs; and water she saw in a bucket used to mop the floor was black. “It smelled bad; it smelt of death”, she said.
Oxfam installed a 5,000 liter water bladder in the hospital, and also trucked water to the site so that soiled surgery clothes and bedding could be washed, the kitchen could re-open, and workers in the morgue could wash down the floors, and lessen the putrefying sickly smell of corpses.
“Oxfam has helped”, said Hencia Josena, one of the laundrywomen. “Before we had no water, no soap.”
Staff told me nothing could be washed in the hospital after the earthquake struck until Oxfam trucked in water more than a week later. “Before Oxfam came it was a mess,” said laundry operator, Jean-Robert Deus. “In the surgery room, doctors had blood stains over their clothes.”
Many patients still remain outside the main hospital buildings, many of which were badly destroyed, being treated in tents. They’re scared to go indoors, for fear of after-shocks.
The dedication of staff working there both impressed and humbled me. From the laundry washers, to the kitchen staff, to the steady stream of volunteer medics like George Williams, from New York City, who works in the triage area.
“As bad as things are, this is the best humanitarian effort that I have ever seen,” he told me, also praising the “phenomenal” Haitian doctors he had worked with. “It’s the spirit, the humanitarian effort reaching out from all over the world.”
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Save the Children and AmeriCares have partnered to bring medical aid to more than 85,000 Haitians affected by the earthquake.
Westport,-based Save the Children's emergency response team in Haiti has distributed more than 16.5 tons of medical supplies in the town of Leogane and at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince – supplies donated by AmeriCares, the global health and disaster relief organization based in Stamford, Conn.
"The situation is still dire and children remain the most vulnerable part of the population during emergencies of this magnitude," said Carolyn Miles, Chief Operating Officer of Save the Children. "But with the help of our long-time partner, AmeriCares, our health team is getting medical treatment to thousands of children and their families."
"Haitian hospitals had little to begin with, but now they have nothing – no pain medicines for patients with trauma injuries and no anesthesia for patients who need surgery," said Elizabeth Furst Frank, Senior Vice President of Global Programs for AmeriCares. "AmeriCares is proud to deliver lifesaving medicines and supplies to our health care partner, Save the Children. Our work together will benefit earthquake survivors in the days, weeks and months ahead."
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There will be a second wave, there must be a second wave and it must come now or it will be too late. There have already been too many tragic deaths in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but now there will be thousands of unnecessary, preventable deaths from the consequences of the lack of medical care from infection, gangrene and tetanus. There is simply a lack of infrastructure.
There are few ambulances or EMTs in Haiti and I have only seen one or two in the streets. There is barely fuel, with prices shooting up to $800 USD a gallon at one point, in a country where a good wage is $100 a month, where 900 gallons of diesel to run the hospital generators were stolen from the back gate before the military arrived. The initial effort by FEMA providing $36 million for search and rescue was critical to save lives. Now 11 days later, there is a need for emergency medical response teams to find and scoop and transport the thousands remaining strewn about the city. According the USAID daily report, there was only $50,000 spent on emergency medical response to date.
It is dire, even the dogs are hungry. They chewed to the bone a leg of a dead man sticking out of the rubble.
Last night flying back on a C 17 Air Force transport, I spoke to Miami firefighters who surveyed the city and reported that they saw no search and rescue teams any longer, only two ambulances and two pieces of heavy equipment. But when they walked through tent cities and streets and they found hundreds of patients who needed to get to a hospital for emergency care but had no way of getting there, now way of being identified and were not aware of available resources or hospitals. Cell phones work only occasionally, there is a breakdown of communication infrastructure. One hospital they visited remained nearly empty with doctors roaming the streets looking for patients.
The immediate burden on the hospital campus has been addressed, but there are thousands tucked in corners of alleyways, under tarps, in tent cities all over Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas that have not had medical care, still with open fractures, gaping wounds, crush injuries that are stuck without knowledge of where medical facilities are, or any way to get transported and afraid to leave their meager belongings unattended on the sidewalk or by their tent or tarp.
Yesterday I heard about Jackmel, a nearby city, where 30 critical victims needing amputations or emergency surgical care have been trapped by damaged roads and isolated since the quake with no food, water, and medical care waiting for 11 days to get evacuated. I worked yesterday with General Keen to find a way to get those patients mobilized. And those are only the ones I have heard about, how many more are there? There are thousands more unattended who now are at risk of unnecessary death from gangrene and infection and tetanus, thousands more who could have their limbs or lives saved if we can get to them in time.
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