serving all my patients trapping cooking haitians

Michelete said he would give one of his few remaining shots to Eliophane, who ran out of his house as the quake hit, only to have a wall fall on him. Josil Eliophane, 84, crouched on the steps of the hospital, clutching an X-ray showing his shattered arm bone and pleading for pain medication. “We are saturated, and people keep coming,” he said. “We have been waiting since morning for it, but there are too many people,” said Emile, a banana farmer who said relatives in the countryside depend on him giving them money to survive.Įfforts to treat the injured were difficult at the general hospital, where Michelete said pain killers, analgesics and steel pins to mend fractures were running out amid the crush of patients. Others waited for money wired from abroad, a mainstay of Haiti’s economy even before the quake.Īnthony Emile waited six hours in a line with dozens of others trying to get money his brother had wired from Chile, where he has worked since Haiti’s last quake. Jean Moise Fortunè, whose brother, the hotel owner and a prominent politician, was killed in the quake, believed there were more people trapped in the rubble.īut based on the size of voids that workers cautiously peered into, perhaps a foot (0.3 meters) in depth, finding survivors appeared unlikely.Īs work, fuel and money ran out, desperate Les Cayes residents searched collapsed houses for scrap metal to sell. Meanwhile, rescuers and scrap metal scavengers dug into the floors of a collapsed hotel Monday in this coastal town, where 15 bodies had already been extracted. Paurus Michelete, who had treated 250 patients and was one of only three doctors on call when the quake hit. “After two days, they are almost always generally infected,” said Dr. Patients waited to be treated on stair steps, in corridors and the hospital’s open veranda. Injured earthquake victims continued to stream into Les Cayes’ overwhelmed general hospital, three days after the earthquake struck.

“We are working now to ensure that the resources we have are going to get to the places that are hardest hit,” said agency head Jerry Chandler, referring to the towns of Les Cayes and Jeremie and the department of Nippes, which are in the country’s southwestern portion. Port-au-Prince was already seeing heavier rains. Les Cayes began to see light rain Monday evening, but it could reach 15 inches (38 centimeters) in some areas, the Civil Protection Agency said. The devastation could soon worsen with the arrival of Tropical Depression Grace, predicted to bring strong winds, heavy rain, mudslides and flash flooding. Haiti already was struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, gang violence, worsening poverty and the political uncertainty following the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse when the earthquake sent residents rushing to the streets. The quake, centered about 125 kilometers (80 miles) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, nearly razed some towns and triggered landslides that hampered rescue efforts in a country that is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. By Monday only three bodies were in the morgue. Relatives quickly came to take most to private embalming services or immediate burial. The refrigeration in the hospital’s morgue has not worked for three months, but after the earthquake struck Saturday, staff had to store as many as 20 bodies in the small space. It is not the first time that staff has been forced to improvise. “We had planned to put up tents (in hospital patios), but we were told that could not be safe,” said Gede Peterson, director of Les Cayes General Hospital. Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency on Monday raised the death toll from Saturday’s earthquake to 1,419 and the number of injured to 6,000, many of whom have had to wait under the burning heat, even on an airport tarmac, for help. Then a looming storm expected to bring heavy rains Monday night forced officials to relocate them as best they could given the hospital’s poor conditions.Įven those patients were somewhat fortunate.

A hospital in southwestern Haiti, where a powerful earthquake flattened homes, shops and other buildings over the weekend, was so overwhelmed with patients that many had to lie in patios, corridors, verandas and hallways.

Serving all my patients trapping cooking haitians