When I was 17, I spent a month in Port-au-Prince, working at the historic Olofson Hotel overlooking the city.
I instantly fell in love with Haiti and its people, who left a lasting impression on me. But these images are nothing compared to the images of anguish that have replaced them in my memory.
The day the earthquake hit Haiti, I knew I had to go. Taking the advice of my friend from The Associated Press, I decided to find my own way down.
I spent the day calling churches, missionary organizations, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, until finally I made contact with Project Medishare out of the University of Miami. Dr. Barth Green founded the organization in 1995 to improve and sustain the medical infrastructure of Haiti.
Within hours, Green and his team had set up shop in two football field-sized tents on the United Nations (UN) base by the airport. Florida philanthropists Hank Asher and Stuart Miller gave Project Medishare unlimited access to their private jets to transport medical staff and supplies from Miami to Port-au-Prince. On Saturday morning, Jan. 16, 13 doctors and nurses and I crammed into a Gulfstream 4 packed with supplies. I sat on the floor of the jet looking out over the ocean trying to steel myself for the horror that was to come.
We landed at the airport, and within 20 minutes we unloaded the supplies onto two pick-up trucks and headed past the machine-gun wielding soldiers lining the potholed roads.
The hospital was two hangar tents filled with rows of victims on cots. The smell of decay and human waste was overwhelming and had me running behind the tent to vomit. I rinsed my mouth and turned around to be face to face with a man’s belt. Alonzo Mourning, the six-foot-10-inch former Miami Heat basketball star, asked me if I was OK and led me by the hand to sit down. I think that was the last time I sat down in the four days I was there.
Alonzo introduced me to Sean and Sendy, two orphans he had developed a soft spot for. I gave them some candy and water and soon realized that Sean had become the mascot of the hospital. He had the entire staff wrapped around his bandaged fingers.
Dr. Enrique “Icky” Ginsburg was the project leader and gathered the volunteers for a meeting on the staged area of the tent. We had no water or food for the patients, and what we did have needed to be rationed among ourselves. There were limited supplies of anesthesia and pain medication, which explained why it was so hard to hear “Icky” over the piercing screams and agonizing wails of the injured.
My first assignment was to organize the supplies and label them. I became the supply sleuth, and people were told to “ask Lisa” if they needed anything.
It took time to familiarize myself with the various types of supplies, but my prolific television-viewing turned out to eventually help me save lives.
The following morning, “Icky” told me that the volunteers who had been managing the tents were moving on and asked me to take over as the interim coordinator of operations in charge of logistics.
For the rest of my time there, I organized volunteer arrival and departure, supplies delivery and organization, attended UN meetings, and dealt with the Red Cross to account for deaths, births, transfers and amputations. I secured water delivery from UNICEF, coordinated press interviews, got Porta-Pottys and containers for body part and waste disposal, arranged temporary security for our site and translated for medical staff. And I took care of the orphans to make sure they got food, water, treatment for their wounds and clothes.
The hardest part about leaving was saying goodbye to Sean, knowing that this tragedy had robbed him of a chance at a normal life and left him with deep physical and emotional scars. He is only one of what the UN now estimates is close to 1 million orphans.
It is impossible to forget the desperate faces of those in pain whose lives are in literal ruins.
It is impossible to climb into bed or step into a hot shower and not think about how these people will survive with nothing.
It is impossible to shut out the pleading eyes and anguished cries that are indelibly imprinted in my mind knowing that there are so many more eyes and cries to come. |
