Whiteside County Health Department
Medical, Dental staff among Haiti volunteers
Staff went on their own time to help the residents hurt during the massive earthquake in 2010 during five-day visits in February and July.
Starting with the first trip, stories about the journeys to help people who have no other help appear below:
Misión Rescate, a medical clinic, is set inside the city’s police station, across from the Presidential Palace. The mission and its clinic were set-up by a group in part founded by Mike Zurn, of Morrison. Before retiring, Zurn served as the former Whiteside County administrator and public health administrator.
In early February, two nurses from Whiteside County Health Department spent five days treating the injured men, women and children in Port-Au-Prince. Beth Fiorini, public health administrator of Whiteside County, and Jean Zinnen, worked and stayed at the clinic.
The bathroom had a small stream of cold water to shower under. Fiorini and Zinnen were told not to to let water get on their face or in their eyes. The toilet came equipped with a trash bag to throw the used toilet paper in. Any toilet paper down the toilet would stop the water system.
Sleep was important in order to stay healthy. Unfortunately, it was not possible. Most of the residents of Port-au-Prince had lost their homes, many their families, and were living on the street. The lucky Haitians had tents. The street directly under the rooftop was busy until 1a.m. with Haitian residents running, chanting, praying and singing a combination of Catholicism and voodoo. It usually got quiet for about two hours until the roosters would start crowing at 3 a.m. Then the dogs would start fighting and soon early risers would join them, taking to the streets about 4 a.m. to demonstrate or get in lines for their food rations.
Safety was not an issue. The clinic’s host, the CIMO police, was always within sight with rifles. They even escorted the clinic staff into the street for walks. The CIMO police is Haiti’s elite police and they were very serious about protecting medical personnel.
They said that if something were too happen to an American helping their nation that it would ruin their image. Once they even took the staff in their police van to a beach about 45 minutes from the clinic. Fiorini and Zinnen were able to travel through Port-au-Prince and see much of the town and the devastation.
Water was not a problem. The mission supplied workers with as much bottled water as they needed. It was necessary to drink continually to keep from dehydrating.
Food was another issue. The mission would cook at least twice a day, beans and rice, spaghetti, rice and chicken. However, it was always up for debate if it was good to eat.
“We had brought a supply of granola bars, trail mix, peanut butter, crackers, and dried fruit. I tried hard to eat only our own food until towards the end when I was so hungry for something cooked that I went ahead and ate some cooked rice. By the sixth day, I continually felt hungry,” Fiorini said.
The medical team provided care for anything short of life and death situations. Wounds, both old and new, presented regularly to the clinic. Streets were full of blocks of fallen cement and rebar. The debris was causing people to fall and cut themselves. Other medical situations included chronic respiratory problems because of the dust in the air, dehydration and gastro problems because of the limited and unsanitary water, and a variety of rashes because of the dirty living conditions.
Almost everyone presented with a chronic bellyache caused by either hunger or constant worrying about another earthquake. Babies came in poorly nourished with chronic diaper rashes. Most of the children presented with parasites and scabies.
Each day the medical team saw about 600 patients. The natives would line up hours before the clinic opened. They would go through a triage area where a team, usually made up of primarily nurses, would treat who they could and send the rest on to the physicians in the back. The back area of the clinic had a general clinic, pediatrics, and obstetrician (OB).
When a surgeon was available, a surgery room was also open. Fiorini worked in the triage area and
Zinnen worked in the OB room. The triage team would treat for worms, rashes, minor infections, change dressings and educate the parents on the importance of boiling the water and appropriate feedings. Physicians took care of the more complicated patients.
There was the 15-year boy who brought his infant sister to the clinic. The baby had eaten only Gerber food since their mother had died in the earthquake. The father had left the city to try to find somewhere for them to live. He had left his 15-year-old son to care for the baby. The baby had not had anything to drink since the mother had died. We taught him how to make a bottle and initiated formula feeding with the infant.
There was the man brought in on a stretcher by a crowd of people yelling and cameras flashing. He was lethargic and dirty. After the crowd settled down enough to question, staff learned he had been in the rubble for 30 days. It was obvious to the medical team that this was not the case, but we started two IVs and waited for him to be able to talk to tell staff what happened. Eventually we found out that he had slipped under the rubble three days ago and had been buried for three days until just found.
There was the woman who fell on a piece of rebar and slashed her leg open about eight-inches down to the bone. In the United States, she would have been hospitalized and taken to surgery for such a wound. She was given local anesthesia around the wound and tolerated nearly an hour of suturing. The wound was dressed. She was given oral antibiotics, and sent home with instructions to return in three days to have her wound redressed.
The patients were the only reason worth going, Fiorini said, as the living conditions were almost unbearable. The medical staff worked and slept in areas where rats walked around freely. The staff ate trail mix and other food brought from home for eight days to avoid eating local fare and possibly become ill. The staff would be drenched in water when it rained. They worked in extreme heat and got little to no sleep at night.
Unbearable heat, terrible conditions, need aplenty describes Haiti. In mid-July, Fiorini returned to Haiti for her second trip in 6 months and brought a dental team along. Dr. Charles Johnson and Jana Meiners used their own money and vacation time to go to Mision Rescate, Port-Au-Prince, and set up a dental clinic for the residents of the demolished city.
Johnson, DDS, a part-time dentist at the Whiteside County Health Department Dental Department, is a veteran of church missionary trips and for more than 20 years has gone to places like Belize, Guatemala and Haiti. Johnson, a dentist for 40 years, reports that he never encountered what he did on his recent trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Fiorini stated that she was not only surprised by the lack of progress since her trip in February, but also noted that it was a worse situation because the number of medical teams going to Haiti to help had dramatically reduced.
The staff at the mission was especially happy to see a dental clinic. It was only the second dental team to come to the Port Au Prince area since the earthquake. Once word spread throughout the storm-torn city, lines of people formed each morning to be seen by the dentist. “It was somewhat overwhelming the number of people needing help,” Meiners said. The team saw about 35 people a day.
“There is no oral hygiene around,” Meiners said. “There is a tremendous need for restorative and periodontal services,” added Johnson. Normally when a Haitian’s teeth decay, they fall out and are not replaced. Of all the patients seen during the trip, only one had a filled cavity and a few had some dentures.
Dr. Charles Johnson and
Jana Meiers work on a
Hatian patient, extracting
a tooth from his mouth.
The team was exhausted at the end of the day having worked in high humidity and temperatures hovering around 100 degrees. However, there was satisfaction in knowing they had alleviated the pain and suffering some people had while leaving them with enough teeth to function.
Sleep also was hard to come by. Sounds of street noise and reggae music blared to about 2 a.m., and then roosters do their “cock-a-doodle-doo” routine at 4 a.m., Johnson said. “Port-au-Prince is never quiet,” Meiners said."It was eye-opening to see that amount of poverty, even more than I had anticipated,” Johnson said.
“It is very stressful. You figure these people are fighting for their lives,” Meiners said. Having seen what Port-au-Prince had become and the need, Johnson would like other dentists to consider going, especially those with oral surgery experience.
The Haitians are a beautiful people who are trying to recover from both the earthquake and from the day-to-day poverty in which they normally live. The parents always had the same story, which in some ways sounds like the stories some parents in the United States have for their own children – They wanted more for their children. They wanted a better life. They wanted the children off the streets. They wanted clean water and food for their families.