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Follow us on TwitterHaiti Earthquake Recon: The Eagle has Landed . . . .
Posted by Walt Vernon on April 06, 2010 at 1:39pm
Our welcome in Haiti
M+NLB got a call a few weeks ago from an organization known as Project HOPE. PH has been around for more than 50 years. They started, somehow, with a ship apparently, which they staffed with medical people and sailed around delivering care to emergency victims and other needy people. The ship has since been decommissioned, but they still have some sort of care-taking mission; I am looking forward to learning more about the good work they do.
Anyway, we are working with The Innova Group, a firm we have worked with successfully in the past, who has some contacts with these folks. PH is working to help various hospitals in Haiti after the earthquake, and as they rebuild this country. These guys needed engineering support, and so, John Pappas, a Principal Mechanical Engineer, and I landed this morning. There are five us on this team, plus one representative of Project HOPE. Mike Olson is a Medical Planner with The Innova Group, we are joined by a Medical Equipment Planner from the US Army, Terry Dover, and Eric MacFarlane, a structural engineer from Dekker/Perich/Sabatini in Albuquerque.
John and I flew all night long to Miami, and then this morning to Port-au-Prince. John had led me to believe this was some kind of primordial swamp, with temperatures in the 90s and humidity in the 90s, and constant rain. Instead, it is a beautiful day - sun is shining, probably 85, and I don’t have a clue what humidity there is. There is even a nice breeze. The other people who put the fear of God into me (or at least, the fear of mosquitos and dengue fever) were the San Francisco Health Department last week. They gave us this book outlining the health risks we were taking, and highlighted over and over in bold yellow, the process we needed to go through to buy some noxious mosquito repellent in which to douse our clothes before we left. Now, nobody will sit next to me because I smell like a house after the exterminators have left. On the good side, there is not a mosquito to be seen anywhere, so maybe it’s working.
Getting off the airplane, I anticipated something, I don’t know what - piles of rubble, I guess. But, it was pretty much like most airports. There was a musical group serenading us as we got off the plane, and onto a bus to take us to immigration. One guy had an accordion, one guy a banjo, two guys some sort of percussion instruments it looks like were made from scrap metal that they welded together somehow and painted. Actually, speaking of accordions, it turns out that Haiti was a French colony, and people here speak a kind of Creole French.
Now I told you that this country used to be a French Colony. Actually, I learned in my Lonely Planet Guide Book on the plane this morning - this is the only the second colony in the New World (after the US) to throw off European rulers. Anyway, they speak French, and, apparently, not very many of them, including the guy sent to pick us up, speak English. Fortunately, I studied French from a Cuban teacher in high school, and both Terry and John seemed to have some smattering as well, so we all gave it a shot. There were military people everywhere, mostly US, some UN. Terry thought the UN people were from El Salvador, but we were not sure. There were UN vehicles all over the place, including a helicopter that flew over. A few steps away from us there was a heavily armed guy sitting outside of what looked like a lunch trailer. It was kind of up-ended, and Terry went to see if they had cold drinks, and learned that it was just some trailer that some guy was sitting in.
Anyway, finally, the bus, labeled ‘Emergency Medical Vehicle’, came and we all piled in, including some other guy who showed up and tried to help us carry our bags (not sure where he wanted to carry them, but we ended up with all of them loaded, I think). Off we went, we thought, for Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Hospital (HAS). Along the way, we saw a lot of people with amputations along the side of the road. Apparently, HAS is where they have set up specialty amputation clinics. After the earthquake, the only method for treatment was what PH labeled “guillotine” style amputation, and apparently, while it might have saved lives, it was not too good to live with later. So, this lab was set up as a US prosthetic maker. Here, they will specialize in redoing all of these amputations, and doing them in a way that allows people to be able to get prosthetics. Our mission is to study this, and at least two, maybe more, hospitals to see what it will take to keep them functioning and to improve the services they deliver.
More later, if and when I am able!!
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