Call with my dad...

Wow that week flew by. The conference call with my dad was last week. He had some interesting experiences and got emotional as he shared some lessons he learned.
My sister Tahne was typing the whole time so here are some excerpts...

Next morning, Saturday, had a buffet breakfast, then flew over to Haiti, to Port-au-Prince. Circled for awhile before able to land. Mission President and several others from the Church there, brought patients to the airport, carrying them on a door (because there are no stretchers there). One man, 70 yrs old with a broken hip, and another person with another injury. Loaded them on plane to be treated in Santo Domingo. I stayed in Haiti.

We left the airport with Mission President and the Stake President, driving in one vehicle. In Haiti there are no foreign missionaries, all missionaries are from Haiti. The UN has been there trying to control the violence for years. Haiti is the poorest country in western hemisphere. Everything is really primitive, like small Mexican towns.
We took off that day and went to one of the local chapels, they had arranged for us to see pts there. Many, many people had heard we had a doctor, they came and we saw 50 or 60 patients, in the chapel. The Church there has 8 ft walls, and iron gates, and with no one sleeping in their homes, there, because of the aftershocks, they are all sleeping outside. So many people flooded the church, parking lots, sidewalks, people sleeping there for past week. Only about 20% of the people inside the church compound are members. But the church is run by generators, and very few people have generators there. There were a number of injured people , many had never seen a doctor before. I’ll tell you about a couple patients: one , just before we were packing to leave (the Mission President told us we needed to leave by dark because he couldn’t assure our safety after dark), a patient was brought in by 2 people – he had just been run over by a water truck, had a horribly torn apart leg, we spent at least an hour sewing on an 8-inch gash 1 ½ feet long. I always put on gloves when touching wounds or etc. Another with a head injury we needed to sew up, we did have novocaine, I was filling syringes and having medical students do the novocaine; they didn’t know what they were doing, and I didn’t realize that at the time. Another, a 20-year old young girl, people came running in, screaming that she was about to deliver, I ran out the door, ran with them out the front gates, into a big city park, about 2 blocks square, thousands of people in it, with tarps over them for cover, no privacy, and a girl in a mumu dress, no privacy, I had to go it right there. She laid down on the ground, lifted up her dress, 70 people watching, kids, husbands, people watching as I give her a pelvic exam. I kept asking people to move away, no one would. We set up a table for her back in the chapel, we were closing up, she was having contractions, and a truck finally took her to the local hospital.
We all had bullet-proof vests that Jeremy gave to us the first day and told us to wear them. I never wore it. I carried a knife in my pocket every day, and I had taken pepper spray, but after first day I didn’t carry the pepper spray with me. I didn’t see any violence, didn’t worry about my safety.
But in driving around, I never saw 1 hotel or 1 restaurant, or an open store, or hotel/restaurant of any kind, in driving around for hours. Many buildings totally destroyed, rubble everywhere, difficult getting around the city. 2,3, 4-story buildings, all made of concrete. So when the bottom levels collapsed, the top ones all collapsed on top. Buildings had collapsed on cars, I only saw 2 tractors and 1 crane in all the time I was in that city. No resources, no infrastructure, cracks in roofs of places, streets hard to get around, rubble covering sidewalks, so people walking in the streets, around ruined cars, making the streets into one-lane street, no traffic stoplights.

A medical team that went down, that we met up with -- a Dean of a medical school from Colorado, the Dean had called his LDS medical student and said he knew the Church goes in to help with things like this, and asked him to get them down there. The Dean and some medical students came, stayed with us, ran clinics with us at the church. Great challenges in distribution of supplies and also of communication. Only had 3 cell carriers, and one went out. But dropped calls all the time, needed an international phone, like the Mission President and the Stake President had international phones. Transportation was a big issue. Hard to get gas, big lines, big traffic jams anywhere there was a gas station. Meals cooked by nonmember Haitians. Like breakfast was cooked spaghetti noodles with a bottle of ketchup (I didn’t eat breakfast that day). Had dry, dry bread and tasteless biscuits. Had hard eggs and sardines one morning, from church’s supplies. Sardines there each time we ate.

2^nd day, went to another chapel, 10 miles across town, took 1 ½ hours, no electricity, no lights, went outside on pavement, stayed for several hours, seeing many patients. I had taken some fruit cups of peaches, etc. so I lived on those. There was trash everywhere, with everyone living in the streets, people just threw it down. The whole city was the toilet. People squatted and peed and pooed wherever they could. Dead bodies were everywhere, I even saw a pile of dead bodies. Much of Port-au-Prince is shanty town. The Church is baptizing 14 people per week in Haiti. It’s a few million people, but very small geographically.

Many of the people around there have never seen a bathtub or a shower. They do bucket baths. Right across the street from the church, where they had a source of water, from a water truck, would have bikini bottoms on and nothing on top, girls/women just bathing in the open, bathing in buckets. Occasionally we saw hand-pump wells, like at one church. 98% of the people very, very thin. They eat a few veggies a day and a little rice. In my days there, I only saw a handful of fat people. There’s also no tourist industry because of all the violence. No need for hotels or restaurants or anything like that.

3^rd day we spent trying to organize relief efforts. Unloaded trucks. Went to a big university hospital, some buildings completely pancaked, many cracks in many of the walls. Bill and Chelsea Clinton came in about 5 minutes after we got there, and we saw all the press and people with the Clintons. Was within a few feet of bill Clinton, whole entourage with several people and AKA rifles, took several pictures with him in background.

The Church is to start giving out medical supplies on Tuesday. A jet plane has been coming back and forth each day, taking supplies around to the various places. We kept in contact with the Mission President, they did a lot of work flying back and forth. We were turned over to the Church leaders, and they took us around.

The Mission President, Pres Joseph, is a native of Haiti. Fluent English. Looks about 15 years old. About 5-5, 125 lbs. biggest smile, ear-to-ear, great guy. He served a mission there in Haiti. He has the most beautiful teeth, very handsome guy, his badge looked like a normal missionary badge. So when I first met him, and I shook his hand, I thought he was one of the regular missionaries. I didn’t realize that he was the Mission President! He’s married, and the first night we flew in, he took his wife out of the country to deliver their new baby in Dominican Republic. Very impressive guy. The Stake President there is a man of God. 27 years old. They were a few Stake Presidents (one had been previous Mission Pres, now a Stk Pres).

What made me come home Monday night was there were 4 doctors coming in that night on the plane, and 10 more scheduled to come in on Tuesday. With the limited communication and limited transportation, there will be doctors standing around doing nothing because they can’t get to where they’re needed.

I left all my antbiotics. I took a few hundred dollars worth of unused medical supplies – bandaids, suture material, and I left it all. Now as I prepare for the future, I will be buying more medical supplies and replace my things. Betadine was really needed, to put on big infections and raw areas. Now I know that for the future, I will need gallon bottles of Betadine.

I did have to treat a girl with a horribly injured toe, had to amputate part of her toe. I stuck the needle in a few different places, cut off a lot of dead skin and had to take out lots of sand in the toe. Once you open fingers or toes, and break the skin, they get really large, like a sponge. Her toe was very infected, she’d never had antibiotics. I gave her antibiotics, and cleaned her wound out really well, and told her to return in a couple days. Orthopedic surgeons were coming. There were lots of fractures, toes, feet, femurs, legs. We didn’t know how badly the breaks were, we just had to do the best we could. Mainly tried to clean up infections, give them antibiotics, save their limbs, save their lives.

Just before I left, as I was waiting in the airport, a little boy dressed like a girl (because those were the only clothes there were to dress in) was just laying on the ground on the cement at the airport, other people told us that his parents were dead. I bought him a meal, gave him ritz crackers and candies, and within 5 minutes our interpreter found out that there were some girls who were looking for orphans. The boy had on gold-with-rhinestones flipflops. We think the girls found him, hopefully they took him away. We also took some injured patients with us on the plane. To transport the people, we would load up all the stuff and then cover it with a tarp, so no one could see what was on the truck. In the plane, we had to lay down one of the seats, and the patients lifted their legs up on the adjacent seat. One girl with an open wound 4 inches in diameter, on antibiotics the day before, and we took her – she will need iv antibiotics for several days. Another guy with ruptured scrotum, his testicle hanging 10 inches below the scrotum, great pain, very infected, sent him to Dominican Republic to be treated there.

QUESTION ASKED --Would you go back? No reason for me to go back, right now, within the next week or so all the injuries will be treated. I couldn’t have gone if I’d had to pay my own way there. Jeremy has spent millions of dollars there, taken at least 20 people down, $60 grand each way from Utah to Haiti. He has a couple of hired full-time pilots, and Jeremy now owns several helicopters. Jeremy is still there, working and coordinating. HE is responsible for saving the lives and limbs of hundreds of people, transporting orphans, alleviating pain and suffering. We were able to get the LDS people quickly taken care of, and many, many others. We were the first LDS doctors there. I spent every minute with the leader over the Caribbean missions. We only had ibuprofen for pain. Thousands of cases of water, thousands of mattresses, medical supplies in different containers are already there, and they’re being unloaded now. What a great opportunity, I’m really glad I went but could never afford to do this on my own. A couple of the guys, a bishop and a ward member, spent the whole day taking us around, I just pulled out my wallet and gave them each $20 bucks, they looked like I’d given them $1000 dollar bill. They were very very appreciative. I never felt one aftershock. Tasha and Tessa had packed a big bag of clothing and shoes, and Tina bought a bunch of Tootsie Pops suckers, and I was able to give all those to the people we were treating. I walked around and gave every patient at the hospital a sucker. When there were families, everyone in the family reached their hands out and wanted suckers. Gave suckers to every patient there, thanks to Tina, and Brit’s idea. Fun to be able to do. They don’t have candy like that, and to have it during a crisis like this was fun, I was happy to be able to do that.

I just want people to know how generous Jeremy is to put together a trip like this for people.