Report back from Haiti - Part Two: NOVA's Response

NOVA Hope for Haiti’s Medical Response to the Disaster

The NOVA executive board hastily convened on January 13th and decided to urgently move up a previously scheduled April medical mission to southwest Haiti. Organizations with infrastructure and willingness to dovetail were hastily sought out on the Internet. A Facebook connection led to Project Medishare for Haiti, a long established a respected organization led by the neurosurgeon Dr. Barth Green and based at the University of Miami. They were willing and indeed eager to accept NOVA’s help and we hastily assembled a team of nurses, physicians and translators willing to leave on the spur of the moment. The list of willing volunteers is still growing.

We made our way to Fort Lauderdale but our connecting flight was cancelled because of need for engine overhaul. No commercial flights are available to Haiti, and Dr. Green was using the good will of personal friends and acquaintances to supply corporate and private jets for transportation of staff and goods. We all had to be patient and extremely flexible.

The following day Stewart Miller of the Lennar Corporation and his colleague Eric Feder flew us out of Opa-Loka commercial airport near Miami. The overriding spirit of the medical mission trip to come became evident: there were not enough seats for everyone on the private jet, and our hosts-in-flight stood on their feet for the entire trip emphatically rejecting all overtures to trade places with them for even just a few moments of relief! It was incredible to witness the owners of the private jet standing so we could sit.

Through personal connections with the Brazilian-led MINUSTAH (UN Forces in Haiti) in Port-au-Prince, Medishare secured two large Quonset Huts within the UN Garrison adjacent to the Toussaint Louverture Airport. Each could fit about 120 patients but by the time the NOVA team arrived on the January 16th these two open wards were filled beyond capacity. Surgical equipment was still being assembled and the care plan at the moment of NOVA’s arrival was to provide antibiotics, intravenous hydration and pain killers. Day and night shifts were established within the various medical specialties that had responded and incredibly dedicated medical volunteers who had come from Houston, Boston, Baltimore, New York, Miami, etc endured 12 to 16-hour shifts. The encountered injuries were atrocious, involving multiple fractures with subsequent days of compression under concrete, facial fractures by compression, extremity compartment syndromes, deep lacerations with loss of tissue and the onset of putrid gangrene. I have photographs of many very seriously injured people which we chose not to upload because of the graphic nature of the injuries.

Eventually life-saving open amputations became the order of the day, all performed without oxygen and on kitchen tables and, sadly, with the minimal anesthesia available. Most of the hospital discharges were through deaths, but there were no operative mortalities. As space opened up through attrition, truckloads of salvaged victims extracted from building rubble were brought in for triage, some at the threshold of death from their wounds, others who could be treated minimally. Medical and surgical care for over 240 people was a daunting task: to keep a renewed supply of IV’s solutions going (all hanging from strung-up ropes), to try to supply the necessary antibiotics on a schedule, to change wound dressing in a timely fashion and discover who had to be amputated more urgently than whom. The medical staff slept, when they could, on the floors of the Quonset huts and atop soft luggage around the desperately ill and moaning patients. Food was available intermittently when new flights of staff and provisions were brought in on donated private corporate jet flights, sometimes up to three per day. The scene was reminiscent of a passage out of Dante’s Inferno.

Nonetheless, Dr. Green and the Surgical Director of Operations, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg of the Ryder Trauma Center of Jackson Memorial Hospital, did a heroically magnificent and successful job of holding it all together in temporary quarters while, during six days, Medishare and the University of Miami built and fully supplied an entire four-tent hospital complex, donated by the retired professional basketball player Alonzo Mourning which is not located on the grassy field of the Port-au-Prince airport. Future NOVA teams are preparing right now to volunteer in this new tent-hospital.

Report back from Haiti- part one

The following posts will be coming in segments. They are the eye-witness reports of Dr. Charles Kordula, President of NOVA Hope for Haiti, who led the first team of volunteers who traveled to Port au Prince in the early days of the relief effort. The posts reflect the situation as it unfolded as seen from on the ground. Some of the situations recounted have, thankfully, since changed, others remain the same or getting worse. I am posting them as he has given them to me to capture the experience of being in Port-au-Prince as this tragedy unfolds:

The Magnitude of the disaster: Port-au-Prince
The town of 2 million poor inhabitants appears to have been bombed out. Buildings are collapsed everywhere, from the center of town down by the port and continuing right on up the slopes of the encircling mountains, where poor illegal shantytowns (Bidonvilles) have been constructed, packed together helter- skelter without plan or sanitary drainage. Wealthy and poor alike have fallen victim to the decimation and both large and luxurious houses as well as poor concrete block shelters lie in rubble. Many buildings remain standing but structurally unsafe, and others have been reduced to a pile of dust and twisted rebar.

There were paltry services in the Capital before the earthquake. Now there are virtually none: no water, no electricity, and no public communication. Food supplies from the provinces have been virtually cut off by road and bridge destruction, the port is non functional. A military transport corridor was in the process of being set up between Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and Port-au-Prince, but at the time of this report nothing had yet been moved in. At night, the city is reminiscent of a “ghost city” seen in the Wild West movies when a town had been abandoned: not a soul is seen on the dark and destroyed streets, not a vehicle or even a dog, not a ray of light. This is ever more evident when flying over Port-au-Prince, the only light among two million people is that of small fires. The temperatures are scorching hot during the daytime, up in the high ninety-degree Fahrenheit range, and at night the temperatures drop so low that four layers of clothing are required to avoid shivering.

All gainful employment has come to an abrupt halt in this country of normally 80% unemployed. The national infrastructure was so weak to start with that virtually ALL aid is coming from outside and the Haitian government is providing virtually nothing. The national police headquarters in Delmas, a busy section of PAP, collapsed totally with over one hundred police fatalities in one sudden blow. The national prison cracked open during the earthquake and 3,000 hardened criminals escaped to wreak havoc in what is left of this city. Vandalism had not yet started at the time of this report but during a walk between the airport and the UN Garrison on the Airport Road, large unwieldy swaying crowds clamoring for food, water and a source of income made the street impassable to vehicular traffic. Heavily armed United Nations (MINUSTAH) forces and National Haitian Police were doing what they could to contain the crowd.

The Provinces
I did not travel outside of the Capital, but met acquaintances from southwest Haiti who recounted the earthquake’s damage. There is currently a massive exodus of Port-au-Prince residents returning to their towns and hamlets of origin. Most of the movement is on foot. Tent cities are being erected where there is open land. The town of Leogane was 90% destroyed and Jacmel sustained 50% destruction including the Departmental Hospital. Bridges have collapsed making it necessary to ford riverbeds. Fortunately it remains dry season and rains are light and infrequent. In February and March this will change. A large crevice opened in the only southern highway connecting Les Cayes with Port-au-Prince and consequently overland transportation between the capital and the southwest has ceased. There has been some scattered damage in Les Cayes and Jérémie but nothing of the magnitude in Port-au-Prince.

The other part of the story: our team's rescue efforts

I have been reporting the bits of information that we have from our medical team in Haiti, but there is another part of the story. Two EMT's from Allendale, New Jersey, Matt Elling and Ryan Flaherty are with the team. They were trained in disaster relief and search and rescue. They have been working with a UN team, searching for trapped victims in the rubble since Sunday. They have been working all day and well into the night. Then they sleep in their UN trucks and start again. Here they are in this photo from their cell phone working in the devestated city.

Getting tired but still working hard

I only heard briefly from Charles today in Haiti. He sounds tired. The 12 plus hour shifts, the unending work and help that is needed, and being witness to this massive human disaster is taking its toll. The team is committed to working at least through Thursday and we expect some of our volunteers to make the trip home soon. This is why we are recruiting more people to join the effort and take their places when they return.

Some members of the team left the compound today and joined a make-shift clinic that was set up near the destroyed national cathedral. They brought medical care right into the heart of the city, while the rest of the team remained at the clinic set up in the airport compound.

Please keep out team members in your prayers. They are exhibiting incredible courage and making herculean efforts to help our brothers and sisters in Haiti.

Again, thank you all for your care and support.

A Silver Lining

I spoke today with Dr. Charles Kordula, our team leader on the ground in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Charles was very excited that the medical relief effort that our team is working with has gotten a lot more organized and efficient. Supplies are coming in and patients are treated more effectively. This is great news. Two days ago, Charles told us that NOVA and OCI should not send any more teams to work under the conditions they were facing. But today he gave us the green light and said we definitely should recruit and send more people to Haiti to relieve the current volunteers when they need to return home.

They feel safe and secure, and the team feels much better about the way medical care is being provided to the earthquake survivors. This is good news for the people we are treating, and a small silver lining on the dark cloud that will shadow the people of Haiti for a long time.

For anyone interested in volunteering in Haiti in the relief effort, you can email me, Joe Nuzzi at joseph.nuzzi@novahope.org. I am working very closely with Sue Vallese, the co-director of Our Chance International on our joint relief efforts.

At the moment we can only take medical professional and some Creole speaking translators.

The donations that have come in are going directly to sending doctors and nurses to provide medical help in Haiti. Your continued support is needed now and in the future. Thank you for all of your help and concern.

Medical Team working in extreme conditions

We have been recieving text messages from our team in Haiti. Dr. Charles Kordula is reporting that the situation is worse than anyone can imagine. The supplies are not reaching the doctors and nurses as fast as they need them and early this morning it wasn't possible to do surgery as no facility for that had been set up. The team is working inside a Project Medishare compound inside the airport. Basically this means they are in an open field, surrounded by a perimeter fence with security, working, sleeping and eating in tents full of patients.

They are trying to do their best. The number of patients far exceeds what the doctors can treat and unfortunately many people are dying of diseases setting into their injuries. It is truly a horrible humanitarian crisis. But lives are also being saved, and that is the good news. They doctors and nurses are treating as many patients as they physically can. They are working in 12 hour shifts.

As of this afternoon, they have begun to do some surgeries and that is more good news. Food and supplies have arrived to the volunteers and this was a major concern this morning. The EMT's with the group are working with UN search and rescue teams in the city trying to locate and free people still trapped in the rubble.

The volunteers from NOVA Hope for Haiti and Our Chance International who are working together in Haiti are facing unbelievable physical and emotional stress in trying to help. We need to keep them in our prayers and support them in any way we can. All the efforts will not save everyone who needs help, but each life saved is someone's mother, someone's child, someone's spouse. Each life is of infinite value.

Medical Team in Haiti today

NOVA Hope for Haiti, in collaboration with Our Chance International, another medical outreach organization from Bergen County, NJ, have sent a team of 13 doctors, nurses and a chaplain to provide critical medical care in Haiti. The team traveled from New Jersey to Florida yesterday, and today has made their way to Port au Prince. This trip is staffed by volunteers from NOVA and Our Chance International, and the logistics are being organized by Project Medishare of Maimi, Florida.

As we hear from them we will post reports about their work, their living situation and the progress of the relief efforts.

We hope to send other teams in the near future, but are first waiting to hear about the situation from this team on the ground.

Thank you for your concern and support for our efforts in this earthquake relief.

Haiti Earthquake Relief

NOVA Hope for Haiti has been provides medical care in the southwest part of Haiti, near the city of Les Cayes. We remain committed to that mission. However, the tragedy that has struck Port-au-Prince is of incredible proportions and as people around the world come together to help, we at NOVA are also trying to do our part. We have a network of doctors, nurses, translators and other volunteers. We have tapped into this network and are currently sending a delegation of 11 medical personal: doctors, nurses, and search and rescue personnel. This team is on route to Florida this afternoon and are hoping to be in Haiti tomorrow morning to assist with the massive medical needs of the people. As you may know, there are real problems with supplies and volunteers getting stuck in a bottleneck at the airport in Port-au-Prince, be we are hoping that our team will be able to be on the ground by tomorrow.

Our team is lead by Dr. Charles Kordula, the President of NOVA Hope for Haiti who is with the team on his way to Florida. Dr. Kordula will try to keep me updated with the team's progress, and I will try my best to keep you all informed via this Blog.

We are currently working on another medical team to go down to Haiti in the next week or so, so if you are a doctor, nurse, or have other medical experience, please contact me at the email on this blog.

NOVA is also receiving donations to offset the cost of sending down teams. Your help and support in this make it possible for us to get help on the ground in Haiti. Any money we collect over the costs of our volunteers will be forwarded to other organizations working to get relief to Haiti, such as the American Red Cross.

Thank you,

Joe