Helping in Haiti: Mount Holyoke student lends a hand in country ravaged by quake
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SOUTH HADLEY - Although she was in a northern Dominican Republic city, Haeinn Woo, a Mount Holyoke College pre-med student, felt the tremors of the earthquake emanating out of central Haiti on Jan. 12.
Woo was in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, for an internship through the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Nursing. She was working as a "doula," an assistant who provides non-medical and midwifery support during childbirth.
At first, Woo didn't think much of the quake, but as soon as she returned to her host family's home, news of the devastation in Port-au-Prince consumed her. She decided to go to Haiti to help in any way possible.
"I was horrified, of course," said Woo, recalling the news pouring in from Haiti in the hours following the quake.
She took steps to help where she could, and like other volunteers, said the experience was heart-wrenching and frustrating, in part because it wasn't always clear how to get help to those who needed it most.
A week after the earthquake, Haiti was still in chaos. Woo was critical of the aid delivery she witnessed in Haiti. She described her time volunteering with other medical relief workers as frustrating.
She unloaded planes full of medicine, food and water in Port-au-Prince and fumed over how the water sat on the runways while, outside the airport, Haitians stood in mile-long lines waiting for a handout.
Grains were stacked in piles behind locked gates, while in the capital's downtown, cups of rice were being sold for $2 apiece- about a day's wages in Haiti.
"Complete chaos," she said. "It was painful to see. There was so much wasted time.
"I saw lines of people that I couldn't see the end of," Woo continued. "People trying to climb over fences, and inside there is a mountain of food. Five minutes away people are starving to death."
Woo returned to South Hadley the last week in January, and recounted her experiences for the Gazette last week.
Food aid has been trickling in to Haiti where 200,000 people have died and an estimated 1 million are homeless following the Jan. 12, magnitude 7 earthquake, according to media reports.
International donors set up a coupon system to distribute food, Reuters reported Friday, but Haitians do not always know where to obtain the coupons and some are being sold on the black market.
Progress has been made, however. Food handouts have become calmer, the news service reported, with much of the rice doled out going into the hands of women who are then expected to distribute the rations among their family members.
Woo said she is concerned about the lack of organization in Haiti. When she was there, neither the government nor the United Nations seemed to be in command of delivering aid. Small nonprofit organizations and volunteers appeared to be the most effective avenues for providing medical and food relief, she said.
"I'm worried about it," Woo said. "This is happening right now, right now, and the situation hasn't gotten much better. I read about it in the paper every day here and just imagine how slow things are still moving. The organization isn't happening."
Making the trip
While in the Dominican Republic on her internship, Woo contacted the local Civil Defense office to volunteer her services and had to wait a week to secure passage on a bus to Haiti. That trip was canceled, she said, but in lieu of the organized mission, a Civil Defense employee dropped her off in Santo Domingo where volunteer relief efforts were being organized.
With a duffel bag filled with medical supplies and food, Woo hopped on a bus leaving Santo Domingo with a rag-tag group of medical volunteers from Boston and the Dominican Republic, as well as a Canadian translator. After a day they were in Port-au-Prince, a city not as devastated as Woo had anticipated.
"My first impression wasn't, 'Oh my gosh everything is on the ground,'" she said. "It was more like one in every seven buildings was rubble."
Still, Woo saw entire shopping malls collapsed into piles of concrete, people on every street corner begging for food or medical attention, and roads closed by debris. Electricity was scarce, she said. At night Haiti was in total darkness, interrupted by an occasional street lamp that somehow received power.
In Port-au-Prince, Woo searched for doctors and medical providers who could use her assistance, but found none. She was in the center of disaster without an outlet to provide help.
"By this time I was sick of waiting and waiting. I had a bag full of medicine and food to get to people," she said.
In the tent city
So Woo hopped on another bus with volunteers, this one heading to the suburbs, to provide medical relief at a refugee camp, a tent city of 20,000 people. At the camp a Haitian woman cursed at the volunteers, said Woo. The woman had met aid volunteers already in the wake of the earthquake. They promised help, but left before doling out medicine or supplies.
"She was really desperate," Woo said. "She said give us something, anything."
Woo's team provided assistance to the camp. They set up a table and treated anyone who approached them. Woo was responsible for finding injured people in need of medical attention who were too ill to reach the medics. She saw children overcome with infections, plenty of gangrene-infested limbs, and a young boy with a severe head wound covered by a simple Band-Aid.
Toward the end of her time in Haiti, Woo distributed her bag of food, providing bottles of nutritional supplements to outstretched hands. The situation became contentious, she said, but rioting was avoided.
Woo returned to the States in late January, just before the start of the spring semester. She is now telling her story to anyone who will listen in the hope of encouraging donations for Haiti and applying pressure on the government and the United Nations to improve their response.
"An independent volunteer with a group of doctors were much quicker and actually able to get food to the people," she said. "It was a very delayed response."
