Our emergency paramedic team arrived yesterday morning from Israel. We immediately equipped them with medicines and transported them into the heart of the quake zone and to the National hospital, the same hospital where we were working on the day the quake struck (see day 1 blog).
Since that moment the hospital has been inundated with patients, with too few doctors to keep up with the influx of emergency cases. The halls are filled with the groans of the untreated, the screams of those undergoing treatment, and the stench of those who didn’t make it.
The Israeli doctors were incredible; they worked tirelessly and were extremely reluctant to leave with so many patients still waiting to be seen. But we had to pull them back to the airport before nightfall because of the lack of security in downtown Port-au-Prince.
The airport is filling with more and more relief teams every day. The relief camp looks like an Olympic village with national flags flying from nations all over the world. The OBI team unloaded 3 flights that came in from Florida, including medicines and supplies, which we will be using in the national hospital and during mobile medical missions.
On an assessment trip today, our team found a football ground where 2,000 people are camping. They had self assigned a coordinator who came and spoke to us. It turned out the 2,000 people, many of them sick or injured, only had one doctor in the whole camp. We have agreed to visit the camp tomorrow and set up a clinic, provide some food distribution and give out non-food items such as hygiene supplies.
