March 13, 2010 Update

By Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes

It’s been two months since the earthquake now, two months since I’ve been hanging out at HCH every day. I am not a doctor. What could possibly have kept me busy at a hospital.

The beginning of the crisis was completely crazy. My sister, Brigitte, had gone to the hospital minutes after the earthquake because she is a doctor. I, and most of the people close to me, were too shocked the first day to realize that we could be of help to anyone. Our neighborhood, Fréres was not heavily damaged. It took a day or two to realize the extent of the catastrophe. For me it was when Brigitte came home from the hospital on January 13th to shower and lunch, and talked about the crowds of wounded that I realized what was happening. We had no telephone, no television and most radio stations were not functioning. In fact we are still trying to take in the dimensions of the consequences of the earthquake. My home is intact and I often forget that many people I see working at the hospital have no safe place to go to. Tents and tarps are the most precious commodities. Hopes of safe housing are remote. How should we rebuild? What does “safe” mean?

What was good about the beginning was that once people realized that there was so much human suffering, they just offered themselves, the things they had that could help, their supplies, their skills, their money, themselves. They just did it, whatever they could do. And thank God, many lives were saved. The support was outstanding. At first, it was just local, then came the world, more skilled, more tooled, and we supported each other in our self-defined tasks.

One of the people who represents compassion to me is a young man whose name I don’t know but whose face I know very well. He was living with a cousin who had two children. He came home from work on January 12th, to find that the house had collapsed. He combed through the rubble to get them out. He could not save the young mother, but got the two children. Both of the children were hospitalized at HCH. I know only one of them well. She is the cutest two year old girl, with a very serious injury in her left arm. She has had several surgeries and Cousin is always there, holding her. The most recent surgery was to try to reestablish some function in the fingers. That was done by LEAP, Dr. Hobar’s group of volunteer plastic surgeons from Dallas. Little girl Euclide has grown and put on some weight in the last two months and she has learned who might be coming to do things that hurt. When she is an outpatient, she always seems worried in the waiting room. When she has just had surgery she is sad, and doesn’t like visitors. When the pain goes away, she is friendly and might even offer the visitor a piece of her cereal. When I saw her this week, I thought that her arm looked really good and that I might never see her again. I am regretting not taking the cousin’s contact information. There will be relationships formed in the last two months that will be forever, and other that were just circumstantial.

For us, the workers, in January there was no time to cry. We could not dwell because there was too much suffering, action was more important. Now I find myself tearing up about small things. This week, my sixteen year old friend Ridky came back from his grandmother’s hometown of Port-de-Paix to get fitted for a prosthesis. When he arrived at the hospital, I realized that his remaining leg was not fully functional. He had a very hard time with the crutches. A nurse told me that he has nerve damage in the foot of the remaining leg. We got him a wheel chair and he spent five days back at the hospital. There was a cheery atmosphere in the back hall of the hospital. He had brought a laptop and some movies. Someone had a radio. He moved around in his wheel chair visiting people and hanging out with other young ones. Twice I ask where his grandmother was, and he told me she was asleep on the floor of the room. I asked why she was sleeping so much in the daytime. At night she cries, he said. He probably cries too, but he is a charmer, he smiles a lot, and speaks to me about my family, about meeting my mother and my son, Max. I asked whether he had news of his old school, Centre d’Etudes Secondaires. It’s damaged, he’s not going back, he is going to school in Port-de-Paix now. On Wednesday, Dr. Kemal’s team from Connecticut worked with him and made him a prosthesis overnight. The effort to stand up immediately brought beads of sweat to his forehead. But he tried, and he will practice, he says, and he will be back in a few months for a better prosthesis. He kissed me goodbye and told me to give his best wishes to my family. He left on his wheelchair with his prosthetic leg and his laptop on his lap. Tears came to my eyes. I hope that he will be as wonderful a man as he is a child.

Among us adults there is now time for discord. In January, the mission and the tasks were so overwhelming that we had to respond, do something, anything we could do. We were effective. If we stepped on each other’s toes, we might say sorry and just keep going because the work was urgent. Now we have time to reflect about next steps and we have expectations of appropriate adult behavior. Some of us expect something in return for what we do and when we don’t get it we give up. Is it OK to give up because Ridky and Euclide are going to be alright? The task continues to be humongous. Everyday about 200 patients come to the hospital for care: obgyn patients, pediatrics patients, orthopedic patients. Instead of being covered with dirt with open wounds the way people were on January 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, in March the patients are clean and well-dressed. Babies wear colorful barrettes and cute little shoes. Dr. Valerie Rice, a volunteer OBGYN from Tennessee asked, how could these people living in tent cities be so clean? I think they come here in their best clothing because a hospital is an important place. It’s a gesture of respect for you doctors, for the service you are offering. It may be free of charge but it is very valuable. So, let us adults keep concentrating on the mission, a mission that is a bit changed two months later but no less important: saving lives. The method may be different, the urgency is less predominant but the threats to life continue to be insidious.