LDS relief: Helping hands reach farther in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Third-degree facial burns. Fractured pelvises. Infected limbs needing amputation.

The volunteer doctors and nurses comprising the LDS Church's first-response medical team has seen it all — and tried to work on most of it — in the three days they have been working to provide help and healing to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

For the past several days, the several-block stretch of rubble-cluttered, trash-strewn streets in central Port-au-Prince between the Sacred Heart Central Hospital and the Centrale Ward LDS meetinghouse has served as a backbone for the medical team sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now the location of service is slowly starting to change as doctors and nurses continue to find themselves able to spread out farther in the city and care for those in other areas.

And sometimes a common thread ties the two separate and distinct locations, like medical care given to a specific patient by volunteers at the meetinghouse being continued by their team peers at the hospital.

Case in point: A pair of LDS doctors working at the Centrale meetinghouse — Mark Rampton of Corvallis, Ore., and Jeremy Booth of Ogden — were helping to take a patient who needed critical care to Sacred Heart.

Just as they were delivering the patient, they aided in another, unexpected delivery. They heard a woman's scream, and Rampton aided the pregnant woman in the birth of a baby girl on the floor of the hospital hallway.

Centrale Ward meetinghouse

When the LDS medical team first arrived in the capital city on Tuesday, it set up in the Centrale meetinghouse, beginning to treat the injured among the 500 or so Haitians staying day and night on the building's gated grounds.

Available Haitian members, particularly returned LDS missionaries, served as translators between patients and medical staff. However, several volunteers took advantage of Creole- or French-language training from having served missions in Haiti, Florida or France.

They've also been assisted by local medical students in providing basic treatments and helping identify and gather supplies from the makeshift pharmacy in the meetinghouse's kitchen area.

"They're great. We couldn't do it without them," said Dan Egan, an LDS doctor from Alpine.

Volunteers estimated that each doctor and nurse at the meetinghouse clinic has seen and treated 50 to 100 patients a day, ranging from broken bones to third-degree burns to severe skin wounds.

In addition to earthquake-related injuries, the volunteers also help treat people with normal, everyday medical maladies, ones that would be treated at local clinics or hospitals, which have either been overrun with critical-care needs or rendered unusable following the quake.

Beyond Centrale