As most of the world knows, on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Caribbean country, located east of Cuba on the island of Hispaniola. The Haitian government reported that the disaster claimed 230,000 lives, injured 300,000 people, and left one million people homeless.
The earthquake reduced to rubbish many of the homes in the nation’s capital Port au Prince and surrounding cities, and forced the survivors—the homeless and injured—to seek shelter in nearby tent camps.
“There are mountainsides where there used to be no one, and now they’re covered with tents,” said Rev. Ken Whitten, director of Vision International Missions. “And [the camps] are still growing and growing with tents.”
The small, faith-based nonprofit has organized several humanitarian aid trips to Haiti, and has eagerly welcomed the medical expertise of some Santa Maria-based doctors.
Debbie Weinstein, a doctor of emergency medicine at Marian Medical Center, said she started looking for a way to help right after the earthquake hit.
“[Dr.] Nick [Castaneda, a Marian hospitalist] and I were having trouble getting into the country. We were calling around for an organization to go with, and we kept being told, ‘We’re fine. We already have enough physicians,’” Weinstein recalled. “And we thought, ‘That can’t be true.’”
A friend in Santa Ynez told her about Vision International Missions.
“I called Ken and he said, ‘Oh my God, where have you been? We’re leaving next week—come with us,’” Weinstein said.
So she and Castaneda boarded a plane to Haiti, with pounds and pounds of antibiotics and other medical supplies donated by Marian Medical Center packed carefully into their luggage.
“If you go with a larger organization, you usually don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “But for us it was literally how much we could carry on the plane.”
After touching down in Port au Prince, the doctors were taken to “one of the only houses left standing” in the city. The home became their base camp, and a reverend named Samuel and several other local missionaries became their Haitian family.
Each day, the doctors and other volunteers would get up early and eat a big home-cooked breakfast before traveling to a tent camp, orphanage, or other place with people in need of medical attention.
“All 15 of us would pile into an un-air-conditioned van that was meant for about eight people, and we’d drive for hours and hours because the traffic was horrific,” Weinstein said. “The roads in Haiti are so bad—they’re unpaved, dirt roads—that you can only drive about 10 to 15 miles per an hour on them.”
Once there, the team would set up a makeshift pharmacy and clinic. The Haitian residents would line up, and Vision International Missions director Whitten would perform triage, sending the serious cases to Weinstein and Castaneda, and the less serious cases to the Haitian nurses at the pharmacy for Tylenol, vitamins, and other basic medication.
“We’d work from about 8 o’clock in the morning to 4 p.m. We wouldn’t take a break because it was easier to see everyone all at once,” Weinstein said. “Ken would come around with water and snacks.”
And while all of the volunteers were exhausted by the end of each day, Weinstein said, what they were feeling was nothing compared to what the displaced Haitians were experiencing.
“During my first visit, they were still finding bodies in the rubble,” she said. “And [the tent camps are] overwhelming. The smell is something you’ll never forget. There’s no plumbing. It’s wet and there’s muck—mud and feces—everywhere.”
Some of the camps eventually got portable bathrooms, but for most places, it was too little too late. The unsanitary living conditions and lack of clean water led to an outbreak of cholera—a gastro-intestinal bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and vomiting—in October.
“You become so dehydrated that you die,” Weinstein explained. “Have you ever heard of a cholera bed? It’s a bed
with a hole in the middle that the person just lays in, and everything comes out, because they’re too weak to get up to go to the bathroom.
“And it’s very treatable—pretty much fluids and antibiotics,” she continued. “The sad part is that more people die each year from cholera in India than all the people who have died from it in Haiti. It is still a devastating illness. It is by no means cured.”
Dr. Kamlesh Desai, a family medicine practitioner in Santa Maria, is plenty familiar with cholera and other diseases plaguing countries like India and Haiti. He’s offered his skills as a doctor in India and Sri Lanka, and he journeyed to Haiti with Vision International Missions.
“I went a few months after Debbie and Nick and I thought I was late, but it turned out … oh my God … ” he said.
Desai stuck to a similar routine, visiting rural towns outside Port au Prince, but he was the only doctor on his trip. At one point, the group ran out of medicine, so he bought some supplies at a local pharmacy.
“The nurses told me, ‘Oh, that’s Haitian medicine. That won’t work.’ But it turned out they hadn’t been using it correctly. So I had to show them how to use it,” he recalled.
Desai said by the time he got there, “the people were starting to settle in and realize this is how things are going to be.”
Understandably, many of his patients were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“I saw a lot of people with eye problems, people with headaches, abdominal pain, sleeplessness—all common symptoms of PTSD,” he said. “Then I saw other everyday issues, like high blood pressure, diabetes. I became a regular family practice.”
One of the places he went to was an orphanage north of Port au Prince that collapsed in the earthquake.
“The walls sandwiched in on each other, trapping children and adults under the rubble,” he said somberly. “No one could come in time to get them out, so they all ended up passing inside.”
Left destitute and without anywhere else to go, the orphanage’s survivors were forced to live on concrete slabs just a few yards away from where their friends and colleagues perished.
It’s no wonder then, he said, that so many Haitians were suffering from PTSD.
“They’ve lost their house, their kid, their wife, their mother or father, and they don’t know how to express it other than by talking about their headaches and abdominal pain,” he said.
Along with basic medication, Desai said he treated the PTSD by talking to the people through Creole translators.
“I’d tell them, ‘Hey, there are still people who are alive who care about you. Things are going to get better one day at a time,’” he said.
But even Desai admitted it’s difficult to tell if conditions in Haiti really are getting better.
“When I left [India and Sri Lanka], there was a sense that things were going to come together and fix themselves. I didn’t feel that in Haiti, mainly because there’s no infrastructure. There’s no government entity coming in and taking [the emergency effort] over,” he explained.
To understand why there isn’t a strong governmental infrastructure in Haiti, one has to look back at the country’s tumultuous history.
According to information from the Central Intelligence Agency website, cia.gov, and travelinghaiti.com, the island of Hispaniola was split into two colonies—French Haiti and Spanish Dominican Republic—in the early 17th century. The French colony became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean through the sugar and forestry industries, but relied heavily on the importation of African slaves and environmental degradation.
In the late 18th century, the colony’s half million slaves revolted under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. After a long and bloody struggle, Haiti became the hemisphere’s second republic and the first black republic to declare its independence. Not long after, however, L’Ouverture was betrayed by his subordinates and forced into exile. That instance of betrayal and corruption triggered a chain reaction of political violence that has lasted to present day.
In the mid 1800s, France agreed to recognize Haiti’s independence in exchange for 150 million francs. Haiti was forced to take out multi-million dollar loans to fund the agreement. Nonetheless, most other nations, including the United States, shunned Haiti for decades because they feared recognizing its independence would stir unrest in other slaveholding countries.
Internally, Haiti suffered unceasingly from corrupt leadership. Dictators like François Duvalie and his son Jean-Claude committed mass murder and exiled thousands of people, all the while exploiting international aid.
Disease, hunger, and despair became widespread. Elections were often fixed, motivating many Haitians to boycott them all together. Most recently, riots broke out during the November 2010 over allegations of election fraud.
Santa Maria’s Desai suggested that people there have sort of given up politically: “What Haiti needs is a visionary leader who can capture the heart of the people and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to work as a team.’
“People need to understand that Haiti is full of very loving, nice people who are deeply religious,” he continued. “They’re not down on themselves. They’re not looking for the next handout. They’re looking for ways to better their own lives.”
As an example, Dr. Weinstein shared this story: “We were on our way back to Port au Prince and our van died on the side of the road. A woman jumped out of her car in the middle of traffic to help us. She ended up driving us two hours out of her way to get home.”
When the doctors found out the woman ran a tent camp, they offered their medical services as repayment.
“[Volunteering] stirs up a mix of emotions. You’re overwhelmed by the devastation because it seems so much bigger than you. You’re just this little person, a little Band-Aid on this huge problem,” Weinstein said. “But I realized that it meant so much to them that we just showed up.”
How we can help
Of course, not everyone is a doctor capable of volunteering in Haiti. So what can the average Northern Santa Barbara County resident do to help? The people who spoke with the Sun said monetary donations are useful, but only if they’re placed in the right hands.
“No matter how much money you send over there, it’s not going to be enough. It’s not that it’s being wasted or pilfered. There’s no infrastructure to manage it. If you think American politics are bad, Haiti politics are horrible. The leaders are worthless and corrupt,” Desai said.
Vision International Missions’ Whitten agreed, stating, “When it comes down to it, it’s the corrupt politicians and police who aren’t letting the money go where it’s supposed to go.
“It’s depressing to see the lack of progress Haiti,” he said. “If somebody gave me $2 million, I would fly him down there to show them the orphanages and schools being built.
“I would encourage the American people to continue showing the same kind and giving nature, but to be sure that they’re giving to the right organizations,” Whitten said, adding that volunteers are always welcome.
Along with his own organization, Whitten recommended UNICEF and Feed the Children for donations.
“The little people like you and me are the people God is going to use to get things done,” he said.
Desai shared his own theory on how to help Haiti as well: humanitarian tourism.
“The Dominican Republic shares the same island as Haiti. It’s a tourist Mecca,” he said. “It’s the same island, the same water … but if you look on Google Earth or something like that, Haiti looks like a nuclear bomb hit it.”
To jumpstart the Haitian economy, Desai said, entrepreneurs should develop resorts where volunteers can stay with their families.
“It’s Club Med for Haiti. The families can stay and enjoy their vacations, while the doctors can go out each day and enrich their hearts by volunteering,” he said. “And it doesn’t have to be just doctors. It can be architects or teachers—anyone who can help Haiti.”
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 13-20, 2011.