Saving Lives in Haiti

Just now able to get out my first post since arriving in Haiti. This is from an article for a London publication.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Transformational Development Agency's team has just left an area of Port-au-Prince where a family asked them to help recover the bodies of three loved ones buried under their house when it collapsed in the January 12th earthquake.

There is nothing the team or anyone else can do to remove the thousands of pounds of rubble without the heavy equipment still needed to clear much of Haiti's ruins.

Since Sunday, TDA's 40-member team, comprised mostly of doctors, nurses, paramedics and EMT's, has been performing surgeries and other medical procedures on victims severely injured in the earthquake that killed more than 150,000 people. "Initially you just try to stop the bleeding," said Los Angeles, California paramedic Dane Melberg. "Then you go from there."

Despite initial safety concerns, the team has not encountered any violence, nor have they seen riots over food shortages, corpses left to burn in the streets, or machete-wielding gangs looting properties as portrayed in the media.

Touring some of Haiti's most heavily damaged towns today, the team is finding that critical medical needs are stabilizing. Dr. Ian Armstrong, a California neurosurgeon, credits his colleagues with saving lives that would otherwise be lost more than two weeks after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

Armstrong said the intervention of one of TDA's doctors meant the difference between life and death for a one-year-old boy named Jerry suffering from a possible skull fracture.

"She absolutely saved that boy's life," he said of Dr. Jolie Pfaler of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California. Pfaler found that the boy had never been x-rayed or assessed and was able to get him immediate surgery at the main tent hospital at Port-au-Prince airport.

"Haiti destroyed."
Amidst the tragedy in Haiti, the team celebrated reuniting one of its members with his family, whom he'd not seen since before the earthquake. Edison Senat traveled with TDA from the United States to serve as an interpreter.

On January 12th, he had received a text message from his father: "Haiti destroyed," it said. "We had a terrible earthquake." While several friends and two cousins were killed, Senat was able to hug his three sisters for the first time in nearly a year when they were able to meet him at a TDA medical clinic.  "I know God protected my family," Edison said.

not just broken bones
TDA's team includes several non-medical volunteers as well. They have been instrumental in offering comfort and encouragement to earthquake victims, particularly orphaned children.

Bree Bailey, a Production Manager at California's Lionsgate Studios, said she came on the trip because, "A doctor may come here and fix a child's broken bone, you may come here and fix a child's broken heart."

TDA team leader Rikki Alakija is already looking to future involvement in Haiti as the country begins the long rebuilding process. He plans to bring construction teams within the next month or two and expects TDA to help develop employment opportunities to help those left jobless as a result of the quake.

As the team prepares to return to the United States, Alakija summed up their feelings, saying, "When everybody leaves here, they will take a little bit of Haiti with them and leave a little bit of themselves in Haiti."

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