LDS relief: Aid team packs for home, reflects

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Tuesday evening was the two-week mark since the Jan. 12 earthquake leveled much of Haiti and the capital city of Port-Au-Prince, resulting in an estimated 150,000 deaths to date.

Tuesday evening also marked the eight-day mark in Haiti for the LDS Church-sponsored medical team of volunteer doctors and nurses, who provided care for those injured in the quake and others needing daily medical attention, with local clinics and hospitals either jammed with the critically injured or toppled in the disaster.

The second and final wave of the volunteers packed Tuesday night to head back home to Utah and other U.S. destinations. That was after spending the final day breaking into several groups to accomplish myriad tasks — delivering truck- and van-loads of much-needed food to patients and staff at three major hospitals, treating a handful of patients, running supplies to a local orphanage and shuttling previous patients back and forth between hospitals and home.

In the first few days after the initial quake, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called on 14 doctors and nurses and a pair of licensed social workers to head down to Haiti to participate in post-quake humanitarian aid there.

For the LDS Church, it was the first such major medical-response effort and the earliest they've ever sent in mental-health counselors. Of added benefit was the fact that a half-dozen of the participants spoke either Haitian Creole or French.

"To be able to not only provide the medical care but to do it in the language that's required is pretty important so that there is no misunderstanding in rendering the services," said Lynn Samsel, the church's director of humanitarian emergency response and community services.

For team members, it was a memorable and life-changing experience.

"For me, it was the immensity of the catastrophe, feeling like literally every square inch of that part of the country was affected," said Mark Rampton, a doctor from Corvallis, Ore. "The amount of injury, physical displacement, loss of job, loss of home, loss of family and loss of life is something beyond anything I could have ever imagined."

For Alpine doctor Dan Egan, "the immensity and score of the destruction in Haiti was sort of like kicking a man when he was already down."

And yet, the medical team members saw glimpses of hope.

"The Haitian people are sensitive," Egan said. "They're a very strong, polite people."

The medical volunteers were pleased with the results of such an inaugural effort of sending a team steeped with trauma and orthopedic specialists so soon into a such a disaster area. The church had sent smaller groups into disaster areas such as after Hurricane Katrina.