Andedan Port-au-Prince

We are safe and sound in Port-au-Prince. The travel here was unnaturally smooth. After three days, three plane rides, and eight hours of bus ride we arrived in Port-au-Prince last Sunday, all in one piece and all luggage still in tow. So the title of the blog will have to be changed for the time being. Our team with CrossWorld is now three. Sara, Lisa (our new edition from Philly who is an ER nurse), and I.

We've landed at a school that has now turned into a base camp of sorts for medical teams coming and going. It is so organized and functional, I was seriously speechless when I got here. We were greeted with a hot meal of Haitian rice and beans (and if any of you know me, you'd know how excited I was for this), and the miraculous news that we were allotted a 3 minute showers everyday! The networking that is going on here is truly amazing. Trying to connect functioning hospitals, short term medical teams, and clinics among tent cities is beyond anything I expected. A special crisis response team is coordinating all this, so we are assigned to a place to work every day depending on where there is a need. Like I said, pretty amazing.

The city...is just a sight to see. It's really hard to put into words. You will see a building completely turned rubble, but every building surrounding it is ok. Every fifth or sixth building has massive damage. Everyday we see damage or rubble that you just can't comprehend all happened in the span of 40 seconds. And it still seems like people aren't going inside most buildings. There are makeshift tents everywhere you look. So many just popped up on the sidewalk or on the center median of the street or wherever there was open land. There are a few massive ones around the palace area. Seeing the palace, that just sort of crumbled on itself, is just something else.

But this city is so alive. It is bustling, movement everywhere; people coming and going everywhere. Business is going even if it's not happening inside buildings. There is food for sale on every street and people trying to sell other goods. Several places in the city I see Haitian crews with matching t-shirts, brooms in hand, cleaning up their city; all sweeping in a group, cleaning the streets, piling rubble together, piling garbage together.

I've gotten to see so much of the city, because for the past 3 days I've worked in a hospital across town, so it takes about an hour to drive there (the traffic is horrendous). I got shuffled to work in pediatrics (I always find the babies somehow). It's chaos to say the least, but it's getting better. The day before we arrived a team from the states was just opening up a ward for kids, so just finding organization and a process has been a little chaotic. So far I've been able to do triage, and then work on admitting and making sure meds are done for inpatients. The majority by far is diarrhea, dehydration, and breathing problems. So many new babies that are sleeping outside in tents. It's so hard to take. In every space on the hospital land there are tents or tarps set up with patients sleeping on mats; most are amputations.

But Haitians are still Haitians. They are alive. Most are suffering, but they still make me laugh and some how the jokes always tumble out of my mouth in Creole.

We are in good spirits here...