News From Leogane

Despite the extremely hot temperatures, our team is out in full force, doing home visits and seeing people in the clinic. Using the electric generators that the Japanese brought, the team is utilizing their materials as well as possible. The crew from Iowa has been working on medically-based health needs, while our team is working primarily on pediatrics and orthopedic-based needs. The people of Leogane are living in tent cities, with approximately 300 people living on each "block." With limited food supplies and no potable water, families are reuniting, connecting with one another, and expanding their communities in ways they could not have foreseen. Little boys collect cans and string and spend hours trying to fly their invented kites while mothers and fathers look after our nursing staff and ensure our loved ones are receiving loving support.

While death is a veil over Haiti, life is sprouting and healing is taking place. The United States Marines travels throughout the country, young people in the heat wearing full regalia, passing out smiles and picking up the injured. They stop by our team's clinic to drop off critically ill patients, and once those patients are stabilized, the Marines take them to their naval ship to continue treating them. The Marines are gentle with children, and give all children any/everything they may carry in their pockets. They ask Haitians, in fragments of verbal language and gestures, permission to support, and they cradle babies as if they have been doing so all their lives.

Our team sees at least 200 people per day and is performing 20-30 orthopedic surgeries per daily. Mom tends to children and worked with her team yesterday and greeted a baby entering the world. The mother of this child will undoubtedly remember the man who held her body and the man and woman who caught her child as she entered the world! Along the road from Leogane to Haiti, where Mom was driving to get anesthesia to bring back to camp, people making a mass exodus from the scene of their earthquake devastation. Everywhere, people are helping people. Mom reported that not a single one of her patients has died! She stays up at night monitoring the children, using a headlamp as her source of light. She has identified all the street dogs, not by their shape or color, but by their howls, and I listened to the baying of sorrowful dogs in the background throughout the entire conversation. While the people surrounding Mom seem to be working hard to glue back pieces of their lives, it is the dogs that are staying in one place and verbally mourning the evident disaster of the earthquake.

Our team is now a family. They love and value one another, and they are keeping their eyes on the goal of supporting the people around them.