Early on the 16th of February I got on a shuttle to the airport and had slept only a few hours. Most of our team of fourteen had barely slept; some had stayed awake since the briefing the day before. Every flight we took to Santo Domingo, Dominican Rep. announced our team and one flight cheered. As we landed in the D.R. we were met by an amazing man Francisco Sabado who lives in Santo Domingo with his wife and kids as physicians giving aid to different areas in the DR and Haiti. They were able to put our team up for a night and bless us with an eight-hour bus ride into Port-au-prince. During our bus ride I took out a backpack guitar and we worshiped for almost three hours and the bus was filled with the spirit. We were ready to be lead into what ever God would have us do in Haiti. Pulling up to Quisqueya a private Christian school that had become a base camp for CRI and over two hundred responders and translators. Our team had great energy coming off the bus and it made a big impression on the other people on the compound.
After a short orientation of the compound we had a quick dinner of beans and rice and met to brief for the next day. Right off the bat there was a request for medical people at a clinic in an area called Petit Goave. There is a Wesleyan church compound that is one of the only medical aid to nearly 170,000 people. A hospital a few minutes away from the church compound was slowly being set up by the Canadian Red Cross but was not taking traumas, pediatrics or OB/GYN. When initially went to Petit Goave we dropped off part of our team in Leogane at an orphanage to remove rubble and take down walls to provide shelters for over 50 people there before the rainy season. All they had were 14 lb. sledgehammers and a couple of picks and buckets, having to bend the rebar by hand. When we pulled up to the gate at the orphanage on our way to Petit Goave, a roar erupted from behind the walls because they knew that on the other side was our CRI team. When the gates opened and the team leader Carissa jumped off the truck she was almost knocked down because of the onslaught of children. My heart broke at that moment as I sat in the back of the truck and wept. In Petit Goave we had minimal water supply and slept in tents with a coed bathroom that had three showers when water was available. Our clinics were a few canopies and a small shelter made of plywood that the US Marines had set up as an ICU and a concrete building left standing that was used as a pharmacy and birthing center that had a plastic folding table as the birthing table. We delivered twelve babies in the four days that we were in Petit Goave. I was able to work with an amazing team of Wesleyan Canadian nurses and physicians. During our time there we had a fifteen-day-old baby come in with a fever and in respiratory distress with a SPO2 of around 77%. The mother was not able to produce much milk leaving the baby very malnourished. Our team jumped into action and got a NG tube in the stomach to give the baby nourishment. The baby looked very grey and was not very responsive. During the morning from 9am to 1pm the Spanish armada came to assist us with a pediatrician and some times a dentist and an OB/GYN. The Spanish pediatrician saw us working on the 15 day old child and asked us if were going to try and save the baby. We said of course she’s still breathing and her hearts still beating. As we were praying over baby Beyonce the Spanish gave us some of their oxygen and over a period of 5 hours baby Beyonce looked so much better and was able to be transported to a near by hospital at Decony. God was so gracious to let us pray over Beyonce and speak life into her destiny. This little girl touched my heart so much. I pray for her even now, knowing that God has great plans for her. The same day as we were caring for Beyonce the Spanish came back from their ship with a 2 year-old boy that was taken to their ship because he came in septic and unresponsive. He had died earlier that morning and they had called the family to come and pick up the body. The family was mourning and some of the members would throw themselves on the ground to express their sorrow. One of my team members thought that it might be a demon but I told her that it was a very expressive culture as explained to me from my mom and grandparents from their time as missionaries in Africa. I kept biting my lip to not weep from the whirlwind of emotion going on inside me. While we were in Petit Goave the camp directors told us that if we heard a rustle in the trees to cover our heads from a falling mango or coconut. The second day I got to help stitch up a boy whose forehead was lacerated from a falling mango. The food was pretty good most of the time in Petit Goave. One night the cooks made a goat dumpling stew over rice; it was pretty good. I got sick the second day but the rest of the trip I was functioning back to normal. One of the jobs I got to do at the Wesleyan compound was to keep order at the front line where the Haitian people would gather to be seen everyday. The first two days of the trip we had 6 firefighters from Portland, OR who were over 6 feet and full of muscle helping keep the line but the last couple days it was not as tight. I found that as long as you covered the line well early in the day it would stay in order better the rest of the day. It was hard to leave Petit Goave after four days of seeing 250-600 patience each day and building up great relationships with the people there on the compound. On our drive back to Port-Au-Prince we picked up the rest of our team that had been in Leogane at the orphanage. We could barely explain our stories to each other because the truck was so loud but getting reunited after four days apart was like seeing a close family member that you hadn’t seen in a long time.
Blessings, Ian
