Logan nurses' aid trip to Haiti more than bargained for

LOGAN — It started as a routine mission trip to help orphans in Haiti, but the day after Mandi McBride and Carol Smith, two emergency room nurses from Logan, arrived, they were faced with heaps of dead and wounded and a town in chaos and they are just happy to be alive.

In the aftermath of Tuesday's earthquake, the two find themselves stitching wounds and dealing with a continuous stream of head injuries, broken bones and lacerations. Notes the Web site reachouttohaiti.com, dedicated to the Ruuska Village orphanage located in Bon Repos a few miles from Port-au-Prince, the Utah nurses "sure got a whole lot more helping out than they planned on."

Mandi McBride was in the heart of the capital city Thursday and described the scene in an e-mail to her sister, Angie Rasmussen, also from Logan.

"It is a mess to say the least," Mandi McBride wrote. "Dead bodies everywhere that are being hauled off by the truck loads. Indescribable."

Rasmussen found out Thursday morning that her 10-year-old daughter, Abigaelle, who she has been trying to adopt for four years, is alive. Abigaelle, along with another 225 orphans from Foyer De Sion, made it out alive. This news made her cry for 10 minutes straight, Rasmussen said.

She and her sister, who has two adopted Haitian children at home in Utah, go to Haiti every three months to help out with the medical needs at an orphanage there, but Rasmussen had decided not go on this latest trip.

Mandi McBride's husband, Kevin, was at work for Associated Brigham Contractors when he learned of the earthquake from a friend who called to ask how Mandi was. He said he rushed home and pored over the Internet and watched the news and waited. "My heart just sunk," he said. He and Mandi traveled to Haiti 10 times during the process of adopting their two children, Schnaider, 4, and Charbine, 17, from an orphanage in Petionville, just east of the capital.

He prayed that the phone would ring and waited two very long hours before it did. Unlike most caught in the quake's chaos, Mandi McBride was able to borrow a satellite phone and get through fairly quickly to tell him she survived, albeit with some injuries. She has a possibly broken ankle and cuts that have her worried about infection.

Now the family's worried about Charbine's friends and family in Haiti, with whom they've stayed in close contact since the adoption. No word about her birth mom or brothers, Kevin McBride said, although they did hear most people in the orphanage where the children grew up are safe.