One huge, even dust cloud
One huge dust cloud
I stood up and turned around. From our rural hill not far from Port au Prince, we have a view of the whole city. When I looked out towards the city and the ocean, I realized what had just happened. The entire city went up in dust. One huge, even dust cloud arose from the entire massive city. It was like a bomb had gone off and it was the smoke rising. That may have been enough to deal with, except that we realized that we had a team of 53 Canadians visiting on a short-term mission trip. We went into leader mode.
Laurens went to check on things and I gathered the team. Grant went to get the ambulance and I gathered the visiting nurses and doc. We jumped into the ambulance and headed down to the clinic. Grant took the team in and I rushed to the front gate of our mission. By the time I got there, the injured started arriving. They came in tap tap (a pick-up truck taxi) after tap tap. Children, women and men.
Their arms and legs were crushed, their bones sticking out of their bodies, their heads gashed open. Some were crying in pain, some were barely alive. Five, six, seven people per truck.
It looked like war
For the next 33 hours, we worked on the traumatic cases that lay before us. It looked like war. We did not know the integrity of the clinic yet so we could not go inside.
The aftershocks started to come and were frequent. We had to get supplies inside but ran back out with every aftershock. The injured were lying all over our outside walkway.
Grant, our visiting nurses and I worked on triaging the worst patients. We are not a full-service hospital; we are just a clinic.
We heard that the biggest hospital in Port au Prince, General Hospital, had crashed down. Doctors without Borders had crashed (the only two main ER's in the entire city!) We got further reports that other hospitals were down. We started to realize that we were all there was for miles and miles and miles.
