Report from Haiti: Mustard Seed project goes to work in remote Haiti village
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
A Hatfield woman who arrived in Haiti just hours before last Tuesday's earthquake is assisting the effort to get medical care to people now streaming out of Port-au-Prince in search of help.
Jan Davis is in Les Cayes, a town of about 70,000 people about 100 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince. Her husband, Paul Davis, was expected to leave Hatfield this week to join his wife there. Two Northampton doctors, Ann Markes and her husband, Matt Kane, both of whom have worked in Haiti before, were planning to travel with him.
The Davises are the founders of Mustard Seed Missions Inc., a nonprofit group that organizes teams of local volunteers who, about twice a year, travel to Haiti to bring medical care to several remote villages outside Les Cayes.
The town, which was not damaged in the quake, has become a major destination for people frantically trying to escape the destruction in Port-au-Prince. A front-page photo in Tuesday's New York Times showed refugees scrambling aboard a bus bound for Les Cayes.
In an email to the Gazette, Jan Davis said people who had left the devastation of Port-au-Prince behind were taking shelter in tents set up in a soccer field in Les Cayes. A small crew of doctors, armed with little in the way of medical supplies, were treating the injured, she said. One doctor, for example, had only disinfectant on hand to treat a woman who had lost part of her foot in the quake, Davis said.
Each tent was housing one family, she said, and "each one we looked in had someone who had been injured," she said. "Most of them looked like they would have been in a hospital if they lived in the U.S.
"There are teams of volunteers, Haitians who live in Cayes, who are organizing and managing things. They showed us their locked storage area where we saw a corner full of water packets, and another corner with rice. In one other room there were small piles of donated shoes and clothes."
Davis said relief workers were trying to organize six more bus runs to Port-Au-Prince to bring refugees out.
She said that she is sharing the supplies she has on hand for Mustard Seed clinics - gauze, rolled bandages, surgical gloves, syringes, painkillers, and so on. "We went through our meds," she wrote, "and gave them all of the antibiotics and a lot of surgical dressings. They were in need of gloves and we were able to give them 500 pairs or more."
Paul Davis said earlier this week that his wife, who speaks some Creole, will likely stay in Les Cayes until early February to continue helping the relief effort. She is staying in a house in Les Cayes with people from another missionary group and is coordinating her efforts with them, he said.
Building relationships
Jan Davis and Grayson Pannill, a Mustard Seed volunteer who lives in Haydenville, had gone to Les Cayes to follow up on administrative tasks and on patients they'd seen during the group's last full-fledged medical mission in October. Mustard Seed volunteers have made it a practice to return repeatedly to the same villages near Les Cayes, in order to establish strong, ongoing relationships with Haitians there.
Pannill, who got a flight out of Les Cayes Monday, said Tuesday that by the time she left, rural hospitals in Haiti were beginning to fill up with patients fleeing Port-au-Prince. Even before the earthquake, Pannill said, hospitals in Haiti struggled to provide care. A hospital in Les Cayes that she has visited in the past, for example, has one big open ward for patients, with a nurses' station in the center of the room. There are no screens on the windows and no partitions, she said, and family members are expected to provide meals and basic care for patients.
Pannill said that Cite Lumiere, a hospital in Les Cayes, was, by Monday, doing amputations nearly around the clock for injured victims who had suffered crushed limbs in the quake. In a country where lack of clean water was a common problem even before the earthquake, Pannill said there is a great deal of fear that diseases caused by lack of sanitation will spread. "People are expecting trouble," she said.
Pannill said she and her husband, Dr. Peter Siersma, an internist in Williamsburg who has also worked in Haiti before, are talking about returning to Les Cayes within the next month or so. There will certainly be an ongoing need, she said, in a country where so many bad things have happened, long before last Tuesday.
"Life is never easy there," she said.
'No one has heard anything'
Jan Davis has been posting entries at their organization's Web site, www.mustardseedmissions.org.
In a posting Tuesday, Davis wrote that one of her Haitian friends "told me that universities in Port-au-Prince hold their classes in the late afternoon and that all of the PAP universities collapsed killing many students. That's especially sad in a country where getting an education is so difficult and so valued. This means many of the best and the brightest are dead."
In a Jan. 14 post, she wrote that another friend, desperate to find out what had happened to family members in the quake zone, was setting off for Port-au-Prince in search of news.
"No one has heard anything," she wrote. "So he's leaving on his motorcycle today to try and find them. On a good day, in a good car, it takes five hours. We gave him a duffel bag with bandages, peroxide, ace wraps, Band-aids, gauze pads, antibiotic cream and granola bars along with a poncho and emergency blankets. We have felt so unable to help..."
Davis described arriving in Les Cayes just as word about destruction in Port-Au-Prince was getting out.
"We arrived in Les Cayes about 20 minutes after the 7.0 earthquake hit PAP, around 4:30 or so. We didn't know anything about it. There was no electricity at the house and Amoce (a Haitian colleague) told us why but we thought he was kidding. ... We are experiencing aftershocks which are pretty spooky. We feel them most when sitting on the porch. Even more than feeling them, we hear the iron latch on the gate start to rattle. After dark everyone started running out of their houses. One family is just driving around in their car.
"Jasmin got the TV to work and we were able to see the devastation on CNN. We had no idea it was so serious. ... The neighborhood has just now retreated back into their houses at 10:45 p.m. We pray the night will remain calm."
In Northampton, Drs. Markes and Kane said they have been in touch with Jan Davis and others who are coordinating relief efforts. As of Tuesday, they said it appeared they would be sent to the Bonne Fin Hospital, out in a rural mountainous area. The hospital was already overloaded and straining to keep up with patients needing help, they said.
"We're ready and willing to go," Markes said.
For more information about Mustard Seed Missions Inc., go to www.mustardseedmissions.org.
