Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Report from hospital in Haiti
Dr. Stephen Nelson from Bethlehem Baptist usually lives and works in Ecuador. Right now he is part of a team working at the Baptist Haiti Mission Hospital in Fermathe, about 20 miles outside Port au Prince.
One of his coworkers, Martin Harrison, posted this report of conditions there:
It’s a 100-bed hospital and we have at least 300 people here. When we got here there was only one doctor, he was almost falling asleep on his feet from exhaustion and was absolutely delighted to see us.
Injured people are lining the corridors of the hospital and about 50 are outside the gate waiting. We have some security to try and control things and if somebody comes in who is close to death we’ll take them in and treat them, otherwise, we’ve worked out a system where we treat priority cases first.
We’re getting a lot of people coming here because they’ve heard that this hospital is still standing. There are people coming down from the villages. We’ve heard of three villages that were completely flattened not far from here. One of these was a community of 2,000 people and every single house was destroyed. And people are coming up the mountain from the city too. Yesterday a truck full of injured people arrived.
The problem is that we’re beginning to run out of materials to treat broken bones, which is the most common injury we’re seeing. We’re trying to ask some of the organisations at the airfield for help with supplies. There’s no electricity either – we’re using a generator that works on diesel but this will last two days only. In terms of injuries, we’re seeing lots of people with gangrene too – it’s not a pretty sight.
It’s the dry season now and there’s no supply of drinking water. I’m a water engineer and I’m meant to be setting up a filtering system today to create a more secure water supply. Our water will be for the hospital initially, and if we have more, we’ll hopefully be able to release some to the community.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dan Cruver, Noel Piper. Noel Piper said: Broken bones, gangrene, no power, water shortage, crowding and waiting: Report from hospital in Haiti. http://ow.ly/YQ12 [...]
praying…praying…praying
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by NoelPiper: Broken bones, gangrene, no power, water shortage, crowding and waiting: Report from hospital in Haiti. http://ow.ly/YQ12...
[...] January 22nd, 2010On-the-spot report from HaitiEmail from Dr. Steve Nelson, part of the medical team from Quito, working at the Baptist Haiti Mission Hospital: I’m listening to beautiful Haitian [...]
[...] from Dr. Steve Nelson, part of the medical team from Quito, working at the Baptist Haiti Mission Hospital. This post is from Noel Piper’s [...]