When a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, people around the world reached out and offered help, sending food, money and medical supplies. Many physicians and nurses traveled to the poor Caribbean nation to provide medical care to the sick and injured. Joy Raybourn, a Regional Services nurse practitioner who works at The Clinic at Walmart, was among them.
Raybourn returned Feb. 16 from a two-week medical trip to Haiti with Project Helping Hands, a group that sends medical teams to underserved areas around the world. It was Raybourn’s second trip with the group – she traveled to Bolivia in 2002.
“We traveled to the Port-Au-Prince area with medical supplies and set up mobile clinics to treat people of all ages,” says Raybourn. The group treated people for malnutrition, dehydration, skin conditions and infections, among other things.
“We saw some wounds from the earthquake that had not yet been treated; I saw the first case of typhoid fever that I’ve ever seen in my life, just a little bit of everything.”
The group of 20, including a pharmacist from Springfield and medical professionals from across the country, travelled by air to Santiago, Dominican Republic, and then drove for 12 hours to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti – an indirect route, but the only one roads allow for.
As the group neared Port-Au-Prince and the epicenter of the earthquake, the degree of damage became more severe. Raybourn says while there are some buildings still standing, nearly all were damaged.
“There is rubble everywhere, and the air is very dusty from the clean-up work that’s going on – that keeps the dust stirred,” she says.
But in spite of the tremendous devastation and the difficult living conditions faced by so many people in the Port-Au-Prince area, Raybourn says the people her group served were gracious and grateful, yet she worries about what the future holds for them.
Spring in Haiti is the rainy season, followed by a hurricane season that lasts until October. “I have a lot of concern for these people and how they will survive that,” says Raybourn. “So many people are sleeping in the streets with nothing – no shelter at all.” Raybourn says the tent cities that have sprung up all around the capital offer very little protection. “It’s just plastic or sheets stretched up on sticks.”
The lack of proper sanitation in these camps, paired with the inevitable standing water the rains will leave behind, makes Raybourn, and medical and relief experts around the world, very concerned. All expect infectious disease to become rampant as runoff from ill-managed human waste and trash interacts with rainwater and leaves behind a breeding ground for diseases such as typhoid fever, malaria and more.
In the long-term, Raybourn believes recovery will take many years. Not just because of the overwhelming damage to buildings and infrastructure, but because of the overwhelming loss of life.
“Everybody there has lost somebody, whether it was a family member, a friend, a co-worker or an acquaintance. News reports say more than 200,000 people died. Haitians themselves say that’s maybe half. They think there are a lot more,” she says.
And so many of those who died were Haiti’s future. Project Helping Hands hired university students to translate for the group.
“Those universities are now gone. Jobs are gone,” says Raybourn. “We would be going down the street and they would say, ‘This was a school. Four hundred people died there. Three hundred children died at this school. This was our nursing school – all our nurses are gone.’ It was just unbelievable.”
Raybourn says if she could return to help more, she would. Project Helping Hands had plans to send in additional teams in April, and more trips could follow.
“I always feel like I get what I give when I go on these trips,” says Raybourn. “And I feel so blessed to live in America. We have so much here to be grateful for.”
Posts
