Short Story
Left to right: Bill Eidenmuller, Jamie T. Snarski, Patrick Greiffenstein
We don’t really realize what we take for granted until we have been dropped, more or less unceremoniously, into an environment where these things are utterly lacking. To no one’s surprise, Port-au-Prince in the Republic of Haiti is just such a place, especially these days. The first thing that struck me was that the airport is more functional than I imagined it would be, albeit just as small and out-of-date as one would think.
The second thing that struck me is that there are less signs of recent earthquake activity than the obvious evidence of steady socio-economic erosion during two hundred years of shameless corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency. The tent city blends in with pre-quake shacks of corrugated tin and plywood, while the rubble and dust of a recent tectonic shift is indiscernible from the piles of rubbish and dirt that are the legacy of failed government policies heaped upon abject poverty.
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Full Story
I signed up for the trip through Project Medishare, a non-profit organization born out of the medical response effort to the earthquake, based in the University of Miami/Miller School of Medicine. Although the immediate shock of the event has dissipated, the crisis is far from over and so, given the general enthusiasm for the cause, Project Medishare moved its operation into “Rebuild Mode” and into Bernard Mevs Hospital near the slums of Cite Soleil from the tent hospital that was its first headquarters after the catastrophe of a year ago. The hospital is a 30-40 bed facility built in the 60’s with two working operating rooms and just enough accommodations to fit around 20 volunteers who shuffle in from all over the US and Canada every Saturday to do what they do best…deliver health care where it is most needed.
I was the general surgeon in our group (plus a superb senior surgical resident from Wyckoff Hospital in New York) and was delighted to find out that two of the three ER docs in the crew were SGU grads as well. Bill [Bill Eidenmuller, SGUSOM '94] and JT [Jamie T. Snarski, SGUSOM '94] were just one year apart and I remembered them vaguely, although now I regret that I didn’t know them better back then. After a couple of days at Project Medishare, I felt good about how SGU was represented there. JT and Bill swapped shifts in the tiny (2 bed, 2 chair) ED where they treated everything that they had room for while I picked up elective cases set up by previous surgeons and the occasional “surprise” that JT or Bill would toss my way. Typhoid, malaria, and the ubiquitous minor laceration were interrupted by the daily unexpected event such as the breech delivery in the back of a pickup truck at the door of the hospital or the kid with a screwdriver in his head as a result of a dispute over a cell-phone.
At night we would sit on the roof and eat mangoes and listen to someone’s iPod, or some nights get away for a couple of hours for a burger and a beer at the UN compound’s bar and grill, then head off to our respective bunk beds. It was sort of like summer camp in that way, except that rather than swimming and archery the next morning we looked forward to head trauma and ACLS protocols. JT and Bill, who went to the gate to evaluate all those who came a-knocking and see if they could be treated at the hospital, expressed their frustration about having to turn away patients sometimes. “I had to turn away a stabbing last night,” JT once said, “Because we were full! I mean, how can we do that?!?” But we had to; because we could not deliver care to those we had no resources for.
And then, just as we started getting into the groove of things, and started sort of getting used to showering under a trickle of cold water, it was Saturday and time to go. We said our goodbyes all around to the few Haitians we had been privileged to work with, the staff of that beleaguered little hospital in that beleaguered little country, and headed for the airport leaving the place in the hands of the next batch of volunteers flown in by Medishare. And we realized that we hadn’t been able to help everyone we had seen, but we had helped a lot of people, and that, although the view outside the gates of the hospital was overwhelming in its scope, complexity, and misery, the scene behind the gates was more positive. A few people toiling away at a tiny little corner of a huge mess make a difference that is impossible to gauge using conventional measurements. For me it confirmed the belief that we do this for its own sake, and that using the tools we have been given is a privilege and a life-affirming experience. My time in Haiti and reconnecting with my SGU colleagues is an experience I’ll never forget.
by Patrick Greiffenstein
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