Haiti: How Detroit Helped Prepare Caregivers
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (March 17, 2011) – Editor’s note: This report is part of a week-long series of articles written by Stan Friedman, news editor for Covenant News Service, who spent five days accompanying a five-member medical team from the United States providing care to Haiti residents during a two-week volunteer mission.
By Stan Friedman
Two volunteers who traveled to Haiti to work with Medical Teams International (MTI) say they encountered many issues similar to the ones they deal with every day in their jobs at Covenant Community Care (CCC) in Detroit, Michigan…Read more…
Haiti: Fighting the Deadly Scourge – Cholera
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (March 16, 2011) – Editor’s note: This report is part of a week-long series of articles written by Stan Friedman, news editor for Covenant News Service, who spent five days accompanying a five-member medical team from the United States providing care to Haiti residents during a two-week volunteer mission.
By Stan Friedman
Grants from Covenant World Relief enabled Medical Teams International (MTI) to open cholera treatment clinics in two northwest Haiti communities that were being overwhelmed by cholera.
“We would not have been able to start the clinics without the funds from Covenant World Relief,” says Ted Steinhauer, the country director for Medical Teams International.
Since the outbreak of the deadly disease last October, the clinics have treated more than 9,000 people, saving most of their lives, says Steinhauer. At the height of the outbreak, the clinics in the communities of La Pointe and St. Louis du Nord were each seeing 150 patients a day.
They kept coming. One after another after another. Often there was no place for the patients to lie except on the ground outside. One woman’s family brought her in a wheelbarrow, which ultimately served as her bed.
Jo Hauser, a Canadian physician volunteering with MTI, wrote on his blog that when he and others on his team arrived at the St. Louis du Nord clinic, “we were confronted by a room awash with bodies. They had had three deaths overnight and the staff was exhausted.
“There was a line of patients at the door, mothers with children lying in their arms in advanced stages of dehydration. The families had waited through the night at home and had come to the clinic at first light. An elderly woman arrived strapped to a fence door. She was so dehydrated she couldn’t raise her head.”
“Cholera can kill you within hours – and yet it’s so easily treatable!” says Alex Areces, the MTI deputy director for the country, frustrated at the loss of life.
The treatment involves rehydrating the patients with Ringer’s Lactate (RL), a solution that contains electrolytes that are lost through dehydration. Intravenous bags containing the potentially life-saving solution hung everywhere as medical people tried to keep the patients alive.
Frequently, the supplies dwindled to near zero. Areces recalls that at one point, “We were down to the last of our LR. We had all of those patients there and we would have run out of LR the next day – the next day – if we hadn’t gotten the money from the Covenant.”
Getting the medicine where it was needed was just as difficult. Due to the remote locations of the two clinics and the near inaccessibility via roads, United Nations helicopters were needed to deliver it. Missionary Aviation Fellowship planes also helped.
At one point, planes flew Steinhauer and medical supplies through “holes” in hurricane Tomas. “That was a fun ride,” he says.
Providing volunteers also was a major undertaking. Medical Teams has deployed more than 100 medical professionals to the two facilities.
The stench of vomit, feces, and bleach permeated the air as people lost body fluids that were hard to stanch, and the staff tried to keep up with cleaning the mess.
“I had doctors who came down here right after the earthquake and did fine, but who had a real hard time working in the cholera clinics,” says Fabienne. “Watching people die of dehydration is so painful.”
To read earlier stories, click on the links below:
- Haiti: Two Stories – Two Miracles
- Haiti: Just Take One Step At A Time
- Haiti: Getting Help Often A Challenge
- Haiti: Living Another Day – A Miracle
- Hope, Changed Lives Focus of Special Haiti Series
From Covenant News and originally appeared here.
Haiti: Two Stories – Two Miracles
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (March 16, 2011) – Editor’s note: This report is part of a week-long series of articles written by Stan Friedman, news editor for Covenant News Service, who spent five days accompanying a five-member medical team from the United States providing care to Haiti residents during a two-week volunteer mission.
By Stan Friedman
Modern Day Good Samaritans
Alex Areces and two other staff members of Medical Teams International were driving around the country assessing the spread of cholera in villages during the early days of the outbreak when, out of the corner of his eye, Areces spotted a body on the side of the road.
“It was a young man about 15 years old who had been sick with cholera for nearly two days – enough time to be dead if not treated,” says Areces, the assistant director for MTI in Haiti. The teenager had collapsed on his way to a nearby village clinic.
“He was cramping up from the drain of electrolytes that had sapped all his energy,” Areces says. None of the bystanders nearby would touch him for fear of contracting the disease.
Areces and the other staff members – medical coordinator Fabienne Goutier and Les McAuley, a field logistics worker – attended to his needs. “We gave him some oral rehydration and massaged his painfully cramped fingers,” Areces says. After the team gave money to the driver of a tap-tap vehicle (a Haitian cab) and convinced him he would not contract the disease, the man drove the teenager to the village where he was admitted to the clinic.
The boy returned home alive the following day.
The Power of Brotherly Love
Woodhall, a 12-year-old cholera survivor, had lost two of his brothers to the disease just days before he brought his remaining brother to the clinic for treatment.
Chivinski was 11 years old and dying. The brothers’ mother had died years earlier and their father was at home burying their siblings, so responsibility for getting Chivinski to the clinic had been laid on Woodhall.
Chivinski lay still on his bed with his eyes half open as Jo Hauser, a physician from Ottawa, Canada, began his exam. Hauser shook the boy, but there was no response. Woodhall watched from the end of the bed.
Through a translator, Hauser asked Woodhall how long he had been looking after his brother. “Two days,” the boy replied.
Then Woodhall asked a question: “Is my brother dead?”
Hauser put his stethoscope to Chivinski’s chest and found a faint heartbeat. It was too fast, but the boy was alive. Hauser motioned for Woodhall to listen through the stethoscope. Woodhall looked puzzled, but after listening, he began to laugh.
Nurses immediately infused more intravenous fluids into Chivinski. Meanwhile, his brother ad-libbed a song – “This is not the day you’re going to leave me.” Woodhall sang it all through the night.
Chivinski was so dehydrated and weak that medical personnel doubted he would survive. But when morning came, he still was alive. He continued to improve and within days, he had recovered. The boys walked home together.
Before they left, the brothers stopped at a soccer field where helicopters landed when delivering supplies and transporting medical teams. The boys wanted to wave one last time to the nurses from the ward who were returning to the United States.
To read earlier stories, click on the links below:
- Haiti: Just Take One Step At A Time
- Haiti: Getting Help Often A Challenge
- Haiti: Living Another Day – A Miracle
- Hope, Changed Lives Focus of Special Haiti Series
From Covenant News and originally appeared here.
Haiti: Just Take One Step At a Time
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (March 15, 2011) – Editor’s note: This report is part of a week-long series of articles written by Stan Friedman, news editor for Covenant News Service, who spent five days accompanying a five-member medical team from the United States providing care to Haiti residents during a two-week volunteer mission.
By Stan Friedman
While the world considers the daunting long-term undertaking of vitalizing Haiti, Covenanters who recently helped open a medical clinic in the tent city of Canaan say there is a place for being near-sighted.
“It is easy to get overwhelmed and saddened by the situations in some of these countries,” says Calla Holmgren, an obstetrician/gynecologist who led the team. She has served with Medical Teams International in some of the poorest countries in the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda.
“I feel called to go to areas with limited resources, but sometimes do need to work on being hopeful,” says Holmgren.
She tries to keep her focus on the immediate needs of the people she is treating. “I think it best to focus on individuals and care that can be provided to them and less on a global solution,” she explains. “If I was in a refugee camp or living in a tent after a major earthquake, I would want someone to help me.”
Holmgren adds, “In attempting to be like Christ, I think this is the model. He wasn’t here to change governments or to make everyone middle class. However, when presented with someone who needed to be healed, he did it.”
All of the team members struggle at times to deal with the pain they encounter. “There have been times when I have been overwhelmed by the numbers of people with huge needs and sometimes with the unfairness of life,” says Jill Johnson, a nurse who has served as a short-term Covenant missionary in Cameroon.
“I try to only look at those right in front of me, doing what I can with what I have,” Johnson adds, echoing Holmgren’s perspective. “What I cannot do, I must release back to God, and let him carry that burden. My part is just to take one step at a time. Just because I cannot see how the rest will be resolved, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do the small part that I can.”
Christians are in a unique position to help the suffering, Johnson says. “We may learn to lower our expectations in the face of overwhelming problems and situations, but as Christians we are offered and offer to others a solid hope – something that is definitely lacking in other religions.”
Christ’s experience and his call to those who follow him also serve as an inspiration. “God is present in suffering and knows suffering firsthand,” Johnson says. “We are also his hands and feet in this world and as such have much to offer.”
Tom Spethmann, a retired doctor of internal medicine, says, “I just need to obey what God wants me to do and go where he wants me to go.”
Though the work can feel overwhelming, Spethmann reiterates the sentiments of others on the trip. “It was rewarding because we were helping get the clinic started.”
To read earlier stories, click on the links below:
- Haiti: Getting Help Often A Challenge
- Just Living Another Day – A Miracle in Haiti
- Hope, Changed Lives Focus of Special Haiti Series
From Covenant News and originally appeared here.
