Haiti and Social Networking

Sean,I like your ideas.

All,
By way of explanation I would like to introduce Sean to you. I met him over the phone the night before I departed for Haiti on Jan 16th, because Eric Miller told me to call him to maybe get a plane to bring in our surgical supplies. He runs a homeless shelter in Hollywood, Fl, and put up $16,000 towards the rental of a 727 airliner. I introduced him to Airline Ambassadors that night, and eventually the flight became reality. It brought down 90 doctors and nurses, supplies, and Sean came down himself to deliver antibiotics (I didn’t get a chance to meet him….I was not at the airport when they arrived….and Sean returned to his homeless shelter in Florida. We have become great friends over the phone during this last month discussing many other flights, cargos that needed transport to Haiti, etc.

He emailed this letter to me tonight, copy to you all. I watched the 2 videos it links to on you tube and decided to get on board and sign up myself.

Jim

Jim Smith MD, Pueblo Colorado
jimcarries
jimcarries.smith
jimcarries

On Feb 9, 2010, at 6:59 PM, Sacacon wrote:

Jim what can we do to help, should we fly to Washington DC and meet with the Haitian Embassy and develop a real ” Needs Assessment ” Via list serve and set up a command center where logistically speaking we can serve these people. I sit here and get so frustrated on the fact we can put a man on the moon yet we cant figure out how to feed someone here on Earth. I am a homeless provider but my heart lies with pandemic planning specially the Bird Flu and how this country is not prepared and what we did with pandemic planning is to look at it and understand with social distancing ( keeping people away form each other) services would be shy. So in order to get them back in touch with each other we invented www.churchbook.us ( social networking) specifically for disasters because services and the infrastructure would be doomed at the time of a pandemic and individual planning was really the only way to survive at the time of a disaster or pandemic was to network with each other. As we have all seen facebook is being used for this earthquake.

Churchbook would be designed by zip codes so people in one community could take care of those peoples needs. For instance 1000 people would network with a church in a zip code and if Ms Peterson needed fever reducers and Walmart ran out , or Mr. Brown a senior needed to be checked on to see if he was taking his fluids and hospitals were filled then Chuirchbook would be used. Someone in that same zip code would say ” Hey Ms Peterson I have Tylenol for kids can you come by and pick it up? Or maybe Mrs. Doe would say ” I I live real close to Mr Brown and I will go by four times a day and check his fever and give him fluids and fever reducers ” this way we can serve each other . I am not saying we can use churchbook for this earthquake however we need to look at this in the future for those who want to help it would stop all the unnecessary calls and this way everyone would know what the next person is actually doing so we don’t duplicate services when not needed.

Another duty of churchbook would be used like this , lets say in zipcode 33024 there are five planes that are taking off in three days outbound to Haiti, the moderator would say I got space for meds does anyone have them? We also need pain meds? Then everyone in that zip would list what meds they have and then they all could be given instructions on when and where to get the meds to the plane. I spent so many hours on the phone and because of the telephone chain game many mistakes were made by me and other parties so this would limit the calls and the mistakes. All of us know what it took to get one plane off the ground. I am hoping churchbook gets big and can be used then I will hand it to the government for them to own and control or maybe it is better to let all of us helpers use it for free.

I dont know but we need to figure out a way to help these people in any way we can. Jim what ever I can do to help let me know we have to stop the death in the future form secondary issues as well as getting this nation ready and more stable as far as future disasters and get them to set up their own CERT teams in their own inner communities Every time there is a disaster over there it cost ten times the amount of money to respond because we have not improved their housing and infrastructure. It will save money in the future by fixing it now then responding will be less expensive. The good thing about it , is when we spend money to save money the end result means saving more lives in the future.

To all keep up the good work and I still have antibiotics for anyone to use.
To understand chruchbook go to this link and see a short news story

Thanks,

Sean Anthony Cononie
The Homeless Voice of South Florida

Love as always between all, the world can be good when she wants to, all we have to do is love all. Sean Anthony Cononie

In a message dated 2/9/2010 7:48:05 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, jimcarries writes:

<ap_logo_106.png>

By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 16 mins ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Fourteen-month-old Abigail Charlot survived Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake but not its miserable aftermath. Brought into the capital’s General Hospital with fever and diarrhea, little Abigail literally dried up.
“Sometimes they arrive too late,” said Dr. Adrien Colimon, the chief of pediatrics, shaking her head.
The second stage of Haiti’s medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozen.
And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
“It’s still tough,” said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. “At the moment we’re providing lifesaving services. What we’d like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care, but we’re not there yet.”
Haiti’s government raised the death toll for the Jan. 12 earthquake to 230,000 on Tuesday — the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami. Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said she expects the toll to rise as more bodies are counted, and noted the number does not include bodies buried privately by funeral homes or families.
The number of deaths not directly caused by the quake is unclear; U.N. officials are only now beginning to survey the more than 200 international medical aid groups working out of 91 hospitals — most of them just collections of tents — to compile the data.
Some 300,000 people are injured. At Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can’t keep clean because the street is their home. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach Port-au-Prince with untreated fractures.
Violence bred of food shortages and inadequate security is also producing casualties. Dr. Santiago Arraffat of Evansville, Ind., said he treats several gunshot wounds a day at General Hospital.
“People are just shooting each other,” he said. “There are fights over food. People are so desperate.”
Nearly a month after the quake, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea from waterborne diseases and a lack of appropriate food for young children may be the biggest killers, health workers say.
Part of the problem is ignorance. Abigail’s mother, 20-year-old Simone Bess, waited a week after her child fell ill to bring her in, Colimon said.
Colimon ushered Bess into an adjacent tent when it became clear the Swiss doctors trying to hydrate and keep her child breathing would fail. Bess screamed in agony and crumpled to the paving stones when she heard.
“Please give me my child!” she wailed. “My one and only child. Tell them to do something for her! Tell them to wake her up!”
Twenty yards away, the child’s father, James Charlot, curled up against a wall, shaking with grief.
A shortage of medical equipment and spotty electrical power — service has been restored to about 20 percent of Port-au-Prince — have worsened the medical emergency.
A respirator might have saved Abigail, Colimon said. But the hospital has none. Nor does it have electrocardiogram machines. The sweltering heat inside the pediatric tent may also have been a factor.
“This whole tent — all (the infants inside) are dried up because it’s so hot in there,” said Willow Walsh-Hughes, of Draper, Utah, a nurse who hugged and stroked Bess as her child’s life slipped away.
The wire-thin Bess had stopped lactating after the quake, Walsh-Hughes said. Because breast-feeding is the best way to avoid infant diarrhea, a mother’s ability to lactate can determine a baby’s survival.
At another General Hospital tent, Farah Paul, 16, held her acutely malnourished daughter Roselande. Doctors said the wan-looking, 4-month-old baby was coughing and not gaining weight.
Paul said her breast milk dried up the day of the quake, even before she learned that her sister, mother and aunt had been killed in the disaster. Doctors said Paul had given the baby porridge and bananas, food the child could not digest.
Acute child malnutrition is only expected to worsen until the summer harvest in August, said Mija Ververs, a UNICEF child nutrition expert.
Ververs said that while shock and trauma can cause a mother to stop lactating, it is a myth that hungry women can no longer breast-feed.
“Little infants are like parasites in a way. No matter how little the mother gets herself, she is always able to nourish a child,” Ververs said.
She noted that breast-feeding provides the best nutritional chance for babies in a crisis such as Haiti’s and protects against disease by helping them build immunity. Powdered infant formula is a terrible idea, doctors say, because mothers living in tent camps have limited access to clean water and are unable to sterilize bottles.
Forty-seven percent of Haiti’s population of more than 9 million is under age 18. The Caribbean country has the Western Hemisphere’s highest birth rate and its highest child and maternal mortality rates. Haiti also has the hemisphere’s highest malnutrition rate — with some 17,500 children under age 5 acutely malnourished even before the quake, according to UNICEF.
At a Save the Children clinic west of the capital, about 30 people stood in line for help. Camp residents subsisting in part on plantains from an adjacent grove said two adults and five children died of starvation there last week. A clinic doctor, Nermie Augustin, said she was seeing a lot of infants with diarrhea.
A mother of five, Janina Desir, said her children were barely getting one meal a day.
“Since this morning all they’ve had was coffee — and a tiny portion of bread,” she said. “No milk.”
An official from a major field hospital said the case of 10 American Baptists charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission was impeding the evacuation of critically injured youngsters to the U.S.
“Pilots are very reluctant to take off from the United States and take back children without the proper papers,” said Elizabeth Greig, chief administrative officer for the University of Miami-Medishare Foundation. “That fear has been exacerbated by the kidnapping case, and now they’re just paralyzed.”
The evacuation of eight critically injured children in all has been held up, Greig said. None of them are orphans, she said, but obtaining identity papers after a catastrophic quake can be impossible.
She said she could not say with confidence whether any children have died as a result.

Jim Smith MD, Pueblo Colorado
jimcarries
jimcarries.smith
jimcarries

=

<ap_logo_106.png>

Haiti and Social Networking

Jim what can we do to help, should we fly to Washington DC and meet with the Haitian Embassy and develop a real ” Needs Assessment ” Via list serve and set up a command center where logistically speaking we can serve these people. I sit here and get so frustrated on the fact we can put a man on the moon yet we cant figure out how to feed someone here on Earth. I am a homeless provider but my heart lies with pandemic planning specially the Bird Flu and how this country is not prepared and what we did with pandemic planning is to look at it and understand with social distancing ( keeping people away form each other) services would be shy. So in order to get them back in touch with each other we invented www.churchbook.us ( social networking) specifically for disasters because services and the infrastructure would be doomed at the time of a pandemic and individual planning was really the only way to survive at the time of a disaster or pandemic was to network with each other. As we have all seen facebook is being used for this earthquake.

Churchbook would be designed by zip codes so people in one community could take care of those peoples needs. For instance 1000 people would network with a church in a zip code and if Ms Peterson needed fever reducers and Walmart ran out , or Mr. Brown a senior needed to be checked on to see if he was taking his fluids and hospitals were filled then Chuirchbook would be used. Someone in that same zip code would say ” Hey Ms Peterson I have Tylenol for kids can you come by and pick it up? Or maybe Mrs. Doe would say ” I I live real close to Mr Brown and I will go by four times a day and check his fever and give him fluids and fever reducers ” this way we can serve each other . I am not saying we can use churchbook for this earthquake however we need to look at this in the future for those who want to help it would stop all the unnecessary calls and this way everyone would know what the next person is actually doing so we don’t duplicate services when not needed.

Another duty of churchbook would be used like this , lets say in zipcode 33024 there are five planes that are taking off in three days outbound to Haiti, the moderator would say I got space for meds does anyone have them? We also need pain meds? Then everyone in that zip would list what meds they have and then they all could be given instructions on when and where to get the meds to the plane. I spent so many hours on the phone and because of the telephone chain game many mistakes were made by me and other parties so this would limit the calls and the mistakes. All of us know what it took to get one plane off the ground. I am hoping churchbook gets big and can be used then I will hand it to the government for them to own and control or maybe it is better to let all of us helpers use it for free.

I dont know but we need to figure out a way to help these people in any way we can. Jim what ever I can do to help let me know we have to stop the death in the future form secondary issues as well as getting this nation ready and more stable as far as future disasters and get them to set up their own CERT teams in their own inner communities Every time there is a disaster over there it cost ten times the amount of money to respond because we have not improved their housing and infrastructure. It will save money in the future by fixing it now then responding will be less expensive. The good thing about it , is when we spend money to save money the end result means saving more lives in the future.

To all keep up the good work and I still have antibiotics for anyone to use.
To understand chruchbook go to this link and see a short news story

Thanks,

Sean Anthony Cononie
The Homeless Voice of South Florida

Love as always between all, the world can be good when she wants to, all we have to do is love all. Sean Anthony Cononie

Health crisis in Haiti enters a deadly new phase

By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 16 mins ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Fourteen-month-old Abigail Charlot survived Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake but not its miserable aftermath. Brought into the capital’s General Hospital with fever and diarrhea, little Abigail literally dried up.
“Sometimes they arrive too late,” said Dr. Adrien Colimon, the chief of pediatrics, shaking her head.
The second stage of Haiti’s medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozen.
And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
“It’s still tough,” said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. “At the moment we’re providing lifesaving services. What we’d like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care, but we’re not there yet.”
Haiti’s government raised the death toll for the Jan. 12 earthquake to 230,000 on Tuesday — the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami. Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said she expects the toll to rise as more bodies are counted, and noted the number does not include bodies buried privately by funeral homes or families.
The number of deaths not directly caused by the quake is unclear; U.N. officials are only now beginning to survey the more than 200 international medical aid groups working out of 91 hospitals — most of them just collections of tents — to compile the data.
Some 300,000 people are injured. At Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can’t keep clean because the street is their home. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach Port-au-Prince with untreated fractures.
Violence bred of food shortages and inadequate security is also producing casualties. Dr. Santiago Arraffat of Evansville, Ind., said he treats several gunshot wounds a day at General Hospital.
“People are just shooting each other,” he said. “There are fights over food. People are so desperate.”
Nearly a month after the quake, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea from waterborne diseases and a lack of appropriate food for young children may be the biggest killers, health workers say.
Part of the problem is ignorance. Abigail’s mother, 20-year-old Simone Bess, waited a week after her child fell ill to bring her in, Colimon said.
Colimon ushered Bess into an adjacent tent when it became clear the Swiss doctors trying to hydrate and keep her child breathing would fail. Bess screamed in agony and crumpled to the paving stones when she heard.
“Please give me my child!” she wailed. “My one and only child. Tell them to do something for her! Tell them to wake her up!”
Twenty yards away, the child’s father, James Charlot, curled up against a wall, shaking with grief.
A shortage of medical equipment and spotty electrical power — service has been restored to about 20 percent of Port-au-Prince — have worsened the medical emergency.
A respirator might have saved Abigail, Colimon said. But the hospital has none. Nor does it have electrocardiogram machines. The sweltering heat inside the pediatric tent may also have been a factor.
“This whole tent — all (the infants inside) are dried up because it’s so hot in there,” said Willow Walsh-Hughes, of Draper, Utah, a nurse who hugged and stroked Bess as her child’s life slipped away.
The wire-thin Bess had stopped lactating after the quake, Walsh-Hughes said. Because breast-feeding is the best way to avoid infant diarrhea, a mother’s ability to lactate can determine a baby’s survival.
At another General Hospital tent, Farah Paul, 16, held her acutely malnourished daughter Roselande. Doctors said the wan-looking, 4-month-old baby was coughing and not gaining weight.
Paul said her breast milk dried up the day of the quake, even before she learned that her sister, mother and aunt had been killed in the disaster. Doctors said Paul had given the baby porridge and bananas, food the child could not digest.
Acute child malnutrition is only expected to worsen until the summer harvest in August, said Mija Ververs, a UNICEF child nutrition expert.
Ververs said that while shock and trauma can cause a mother to stop lactating, it is a myth that hungry women can no longer breast-feed.
“Little infants are like parasites in a way. No matter how little the mother gets herself, she is always able to nourish a child,” Ververs said.
She noted that breast-feeding provides the best nutritional chance for babies in a crisis such as Haiti’s and protects against disease by helping them build immunity. Powdered infant formula is a terrible idea, doctors say, because mothers living in tent camps have limited access to clean water and are unable to sterilize bottles.
Forty-seven percent of Haiti’s population of more than 9 million is under age 18. The Caribbean country has the Western Hemisphere’s highest birth rate and its highest child and maternal mortality rates. Haiti also has the hemisphere’s highest malnutrition rate — with some 17,500 children under age 5 acutely malnourished even before the quake, according to UNICEF.
At a Save the Children clinic west of the capital, about 30 people stood in line for help. Camp residents subsisting in part on plantains from an adjacent grove said two adults and five children died of starvation there last week. A clinic doctor, Nermie Augustin, said she was seeing a lot of infants with diarrhea.
A mother of five, Janina Desir, said her children were barely getting one meal a day.
“Since this morning all they’ve had was coffee — and a tiny portion of bread,” she said. “No milk.”
An official from a major field hospital said the case of 10 American Baptists charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission was impeding the evacuation of critically injured youngsters to the U.S.
“Pilots are very reluctant to take off from the United States and take back children without the proper papers,” said Elizabeth Greig, chief administrative officer for the University of Miami-Medishare Foundation. “That fear has been exacerbated by the kidnapping case, and now they’re just paralyzed.”
The evacuation of eight critically injured children in all has been held up, Greig said. None of them are orphans, she said, but obtaining identity papers after a catastrophic quake can be impossible.
She said she could not say with confidence whether any children have died as a result.

Jim Smith MD

OCHA Situation Report No. 19 – Haiti Earthquake – 8 February 2010

OCHA Situation Report No 19 – Haiti Earthquake – 8 February 2010.pdf
Displacement and population figures 8 Feb.pdf

OCHA (UN’s) Sitrep Feb 5th

Please find attached OCHA (The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) Situation Report No.18 on the Haiti Earthquake, dated 5 February 2010 .

HIGHLIGHTS/KEY PRIORITIES

Seven organized settlements have been established for 42,000 displaced people; some 460,000 people remain in 315 spontaneous settlements throughout Port-au-Prince, according to IOM.

Sanitation and vector control is becoming a major concern in many of the spontaneous settlements, which lack proper site planning.

WFP reports that people in outlying departments are finding it difficult meeting their basic food needs due to an increase in food prices

The targeted immunization campaign continues in settlement sites. To date, there has been no notification of events with epidemic potential, according to PAHO/WHO.

Some 80 to 90 flights per day are landing at Port-au-Prince airport, down from the peak of 120-150 flights per day.

Traffic congestion is a major issue in Port-au-Prince and at the Jimani border crossing.

Humanitarian organizations continue to partner with local radio stations to broadcast important messages to affected populations such as how to get food and where to get vaccinated.

UN’s report of the “latest on the ground developments”

Latest news from Haiti:

(This UN agency, the OCHD (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) is giving regular situation reports (sitreps) on the status of it’s various “clusters” (like the health cluster, food cluster, etc.) which are central coordination centers to share information between all the various NGO’s and International Aid agencies in the country, and the Haitian government. While I was in Haiti I tried to attend the daily Health Cluster meetings at the UN tent at the airport. The 12 clusters are: Camp Coordination and Camp Management (IOM); Education (UNICEF); Emergency Shelter and
Non-Food Items (IOM); Food (WFP); Logistics (WFP); Nutrition (UNICEF); Protection (OHCHR with UNICEF for Child
Protection and UNFPA for GBV); WASH (UNICEF); Agriculture (FAO); Early Recovery (UNDP); Emergency
Telecommunications (WFP); Health (WHO/PAHO). Six clusters have been established in the Dominican Republic:
Logistics/Telecommunications (WFP), Health (WHO), Emergency Shelter (IOM), WASH (UNICEF), Nutrition (UNICEF)
and Protection (OHCHR). )

Haiti• Earthquake
Situation Report #17
3 February 2010

This report was issued by OCHA New York. The next report will be issued on or around 5 February 2010.

I. HIGHLIGHTS/KEY PRIORITIES

! The distribution of shelter material and the establishment of planned settlements remain among the
main priorities for assistance.
! Sanitation is becoming a major concern at many of the temporary sites.
! The WFP food surge continues. Some 1 million people have been reached since the onset of the
emergency; 338,000 people have received two-week rations of rice over the past 3 days.
! The Health Cluster has recorded over 1,000 amputations in Port-au-Prince. More physical
therapists are needed to provide post-operative care.
! The Flash Appeal is 87 percent funded; a revised appeal will be launched in mid to late February.

Health

Reports from medical teams on the ground continue to show a decline in the number of trauma injuries
requiring treatment. There are reports of more children with diarrheal disease, particularly in resettlement
areas. The cluster will begin to focus its activities on the assessment of primary care facilities, mobile health
facilities and the conditions of migrating populations and those living in poor sanitary environments. It will also
monitor morbidity rates to track whether the health situation is improving.

The CDC is working with PAHO/WHO to prepare a consolidated list of organizations that are providing
services through mobile health facilities which will continue to be a priority in the coming months with the
arrival of the hurricane and rainy season.

Pests/insects, especially flies and mosquitoes, in health care settings (including operating rooms) are
becoming a problem. Cluster partners are discussing a strategy for vector-borne disease control. An advisory
note is being drafted for partners in WASH, shelter and other clusters and copies of the national protocols for
the diagnosis and treatment of malaria, dengue and filariasis will be circulated.

If you would like to be added or deleted from OCHA’s global sitrep mailing list, please email
ochareporting@un.org with sitrep in the subject line.

Dr Jim

Health4haiti nurse Eric Miller is one dynamo

Published: February 04, 2010 12:06 am

Pueblo nurse collecting tents for Haitians

COURTESY PHOTO/GINGER VAUGHN — A makeshift tent city in a field in Leogane, Haiti, houses some of those displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, an hour west of here.

Eric Miller

By JAMES AMOS
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
If you’ve watched the news about Haiti and wanted to help, now you can.

Eric Miller, a Pueblo nurse and former paramedic who went to Haiti to help people in the first few days after the earthquake, is collecting tents for homeless Haitians.

While many agencies want Haiti rebuilt, Miller said that the shortage of money, concrete and fuel will make it difficult. Whatever happens in the long term, some kind of shelter is needed now for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians whose homes were damaged or demolished.

Haitians from Port-au-Prince have gone to rural areas, but “the rural areas can barely take care of themselves,” he said.

All of that leaves Haitians living in fields, often with just a cloth above their heads or maybe not even that. Tents are being collected at the office of ambulance company, American Medical Response, 922 S. Santa Fe Ave.

The tents need to:

Be family-style tents that fit at least four to six people.
Have a rain fly.
Be in working order.

Tarps will be accepted, too. But Miller said the group moving the tents to Haiti can’t accept small tents, lightweight backpacking tents or tents that don’t have a rain fly, which is a separate cloth covering of the roof and walls that keep a tent dry and livable.

And Miller asked that only complete, working tents be donated.

Big 5 Sporting Goods is helping the effort. The store has two tents that have been discounted 10 percent for the project, one for $30 and another for $60. The tents will be held at the store and picked up by the ambulance company.

While many groups are collecting money or goods for Haiti, Miller said this effort is special because it will be able to actually get the tents to the people in the areas outside Port-Au-Prince who need them.

Supplies and donations have been logjammed in the capital city, or even before getting there, and groups that don’t have local contacts can’t really distribute their supplies, he said. Even when that improves, many of the supplies will be used only around the city.

But Miller is working with The Caring House Project, which has been working in Haiti for years building villages and offering medical care. The project is run by Frank McKinney, a luxury homebuilder and real estate author who owns a home in the Canon City area.

Miller got to know McKinney years ago when Miller’s son was suffering from brain cancer. Since then, the men have grown close and it was McKinney who bankrolled and organized Miller’s rescue recovery trip to Haiti just days after the quake struck.

The Caring House group has a small plane that can land on roads and small runways in the rural parts of Haiti so the group can deliver supplies directly, Miller said.

“He (McKinney) is able to get to a lot of these places that a jet can’t,” Miller said.

Miller said several companies have gone to unusual lengths to help. Big 5 Sporting Goods has 400 stores, but responded when a Pueblo manager called to ask to participate.

The corporation has one store in Pueblo and three in Colorado Springs. Miller said he was amazed the company was able to understand the need and act to help so quickly.

“That just does not happen,” he said. “That’s rare.”

The sale runs through Tuesday.

AMR, where Miller used to work, provided him with medical supplies for his rescue mission.

St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center, where Miller works as a nurse now, has also donated medical supplies.

The tent project also is getting help from Food for the Poor in Haiti and Partners In Health in Haiti.

Miller said he’s excited because the tent project is a way to directly assist Haitians without going through layers of bureaucracy.

Haitians also squeeze a lot more people into living spaces than Americans, he said, so a 6-person tent may end up housing as many as 10-12 people.

“We’re going to help thousands of people,” he said. “So little Southern Colorado can do something great. You can’t just leave people in the middle of a field.”

jamoschieftain.com

Pueblo nurse relates her ‘journey’

Published: February 04, 2010 12:06 am

Home from helping Haiti

CHIEFTAIN PHOTO/JOHN JAQUES — Marianne Wood has returned from Haiti helping as a nurse in the devastated region.

Nurse finds remarkable optimism among earthquake survivorsBy JAMES AMOS
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
For a country still struggling with daily needs after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the people in Haiti still smile a lot.

Marianne Wood, a semiretired nurse in Pueblo, just returned from a week and a half giving medical aid to Haitians hurt by the earthquake.

She said she comes back amazed at their resilience.

“We were giving out ibuprofen for broken bones, and they were happy with that,” she said. “They were so appreciative and made you feel so welcome. Smiles. There are smiles everywhere.”

Wood went to Haiti to work with Pueblo surgeon Jim Smith, who also has returned. She had been following the news coverage right after the earthquake and then saw a newspaper story about Smith going over to help with the country’s immense medical needs. She called Carrie Smith who put her in contact with Airline Ambassadors, a nonprofit group that’s been active ferrying aid workers and supplies to and from Haiti and soon found herself on a plane to Miami.

After 20 years at St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center and several years at Parkview Medical Center, Wood said she knew she could help and had to try. She is married to Robert Wood, a retired firefighter, and the couple used to be part-owners of the Cock & Bull Tavern on Union Avenue.

Once she reached Haiti, Wood said the need was nearly overwhelming. She joined Smith’s group in Port-au-Prince two weeks after the quake.

“When I flew in I saw kids playing on the street, I saw people smiling,” she said. “And I thought, ‘How?’ ’’

But the Haitians don’t dwell on misfortune, she said. They believe that stewing about problems only makes for more problems, so “they wake up and they do what they need to do to survive for that day. They’re doing what they have to do, but they smile.”

Some groups had organized medical services and Wood found herself going out to areas around the city to provide medical care. At night, she and other medical workers stayed in homes borrowed from wealthier Haitians.

All the homes had at least some earthquake damage, and Haitians still are frightened to go inside buildings. That made it hard to convince them to come inside the few remaining hospitals for treatment, Wood said.

More difficult was the fact that while she could help people for a moment, she couldn’t do much for their long-term needs, Wood said.

She said there was intense pressure to move patients out of the medical center’s tents to make room for new arrivals. That meant ignoring the plight of patients like a young boy who had an amputated leg and no known family. Or that of a young girl, also with no living family, who was being cared for by the clinic’s 7-year-old translator.

The boy tried to convince Wood to bring the girl back to America, not knowing that it’s not that simple.

“He said, ‘You need to take her home,’ ’’ she said. ‘‘ ‘She has nobody.’ ’’

“And there were so many of them . . . ” she said Wednesday. “Where do they go?”

Wood joined medical professionals from all over the country sweating together under the 80-degree sun, and working inside tents, where the heat felt like 100 degrees.

Despite not knowing each other, her teammates jumped into their work, she said. There were none of the personality conflicts or doctors-versus-nurses arguing that can happen in regular working life, she said.

Instead, everyone dropped their egos and took on the huge task of helping dozens of Haitians each morning.

“There were no lines. We just picked up on each other’s strengths. It’s something I’ve never experienced,” she said. “We created teams that functioned, people took the lead and the rest of us followed and we made it work.”

She and other medical professionals have talked about going back later. They estimated that Haitians will need medical care for the next year or more.

“To depend on a total stranger to accomplish a good thing, by holding each other’s hand and make something happen. It was so good a feeling.”

jamos@chieftain.com

Pueblo Chieftan Article

Correction, that last entry was not the last one for today.

I would like to share this with everyone who has been reading this blog not because I’m being vain (ok, sure, there’s always an element of that too), but because the author, Loretta Sword, captured the essence of my interview with her perfectly. She summed things up for those 2 weeks better than I would have. You could consider this the continuation of the blog I started below entitled “What Hope for Haiti”:

Published: February 02, 2010 12:05 am

Home from Haiti, full of hope

COURTESY PHOTO/DR. JIM SMITH — Smith photographed destruction in Haiti during his recent medical relief trip.

CHIEFTAIN PHOTO/MIKE SWEENEY — Dr. Jim Smith is a Pueblo-based general surgeon who returned Sunday after spending two weeks in Haiti, providing medical aid to survivors of last month’s earthquake there.

Doctor hopes quake buried 200 years of corrupt government

By LORETTA SWORD
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

After two weeks in an earthquake-ravaged city whose populace is either dead, injured or starving, Dr. Jim Smith returned home Sunday brimming with optimism for those left behind, and their country.

“I can’t quite seem to come down from being wired up,” he said Monday during a telephone interview from home, where he was busy on the Internet and phone, “trying to set up a doctor rotation network through Airline Ambassadors International. They’re making it a year-round program” to transport doctors and other medical professionals to continue treating Haitians injured by the earthquake, as well as the disease that likely is to follow in coming months.

Although he’ll be back at work in his private surgical practice today, he said, “It’s hard to pull yourself away. I’ve already been in contact with my principal partner down there by phone, Dr. (Roger) Jean-Charles. I can’t go back right away, but I’ll be making shorter trips down there as time allows.”

He was able to fly to Haiti on short notice just days after the earthquake because he already had arranged for a two-week break from his practice here for a Health4Haiti surgical mission to Gonaives that now has been pushed back until perhaps as late as July.

Once there, he was immersed in surgical duties — mostly amputations and mending mangled limbs that could be saved — before acting as a coordinator with an army of nonprofits and charities to get more doctors and medical supplies through a bureaucratic maze “that still isn’t organized,” Smith said. “It was the small organizations that got things done the quickest.” Now, he’s trying to make sure that a steady stream of help continues making its way to Haiti.

“Right now, it’s a matter of saturating all medical facilities in Port-au-Prince, but that’s not enough for the rest of the country. There are hundreds of thousands who have left the city and gone with relatives everywhere in the country. There’s broken bones all over that country — the kinds of injuries that ‘keep.’ But by now, they’re healing crooked and all kinds of other bad problems can be expected.”

Although the rest of the country was spared, Smith knows that the medical care available outside the nation’s capital is not at all sufficient to meet the crisis.

“The poor, poor medical infrastructure in Gonaives that we’ve been dealing with and worried about for so many years is no worse than what Port-au-Prince has now. Port-au-Prince is reduced to the level that Gonaives has been at for years,” he said.

So why is optimism the predominant feeling that pervades his recollection of his exhausting journey?

Because the world has been moved by the devastation in Port-au-Prince, and many people seem to understand that there’s much more to be done than simply rebuilding hospitals, businesses and government buildings.

The country has lost many of its government records, most of its historical buildings and national treasures buried beneath the rubble of churches, Smith said. In a sense, they’ve lost some of the essence of their culture, but along with it, a bitter history.

Smith said the losses have emboldened government leaders who are dedicated to breaking the hold of corrupt leaders who drove the entire country into abject poverty long before the earthquake destroyed the country’s capital.

“Being a student of the Haitian story for its 200 years of existence, and the fact that I know a Haitian doctor down there — one who knows people such as the former prime minister, the health minister and other top officials — I am privy to the kind of optimism that actually does exist down there, an optimism that the government is ready to turn around from 200 years of corrupt leadership. There are still corrupt officials, but these many others are people who are interested in the good of the country, their fellow man,” Smith said.

“My other reason for optimism is that, with the huge amount of publicity for such an event, the world is going to provide a lot more help than Haiti would have gotten” if its residents were still struggling in isolated silence.

“Plus, take a national capital and reduce it to absolute rubble — what inferior infrastructure they had is gone — then you have an opportunity to rebuild and do it right, to first-world standards.”

Smith said he also was heartened by the number of Haitian expatriates whose faces were among the sea of foreigners that descended upon Port-au-Prince beginning hours after the earthquake.

“Look at all the Haitian immigrants (in the United States) who have become doctors and lawyers and engineers who have relatives and have been sending money back all these years. That’s a huge resource. They call them the diaspora, and they were there with all the foreigners who came to help. They couldn’t get there fast enough. If the other things I just talked about come true, they will come in even greater numbers to help rebuild. I know they will.”

Smith said he’s not worried that donations for Health4Haiti’s work in Gonaives will be negatively affected by the attention on Port-au-Prince.

“I think all of this crisis will help that, too, although new help is not going to automatically flow into Gonaives. But if those of us with knowledge and energy can divert some of it, that’s a good thing for us to be doing.”

And that’s exactly what he’ll be doing while he catches up with his Pueblo patients and plans the next Health4Haiti mission. That group is still reeling from the destruction wrought by a 2008 hurricane that destroyed the beginnings of a new clinic there, as well as a surgical suite they had renovated in a nearby hospital.

“The team’s trip was postponed, but we’re putting it back together. And I’ll be making shorter trips to work on the bigger picture.”

lorettas@chieftain.com

Latest news – Feb 3rd

(Blogging from the OR lounge at St. Mary-Corwin Hospital back in Pueblo in between cases). I talked to Dr Jean-Charles this morning. He a nd Dave and Nancy Rivard and Corliss are at CDTI formalizing a memorandum of understanding between CDTI hospital and Airline Ambassadors to continue keeping them supplied with medical professionals. That cements the process Dr Roger (now Airline Ambassadors Haiti President) started when he dropped me off at CDTI on the day I arrived 5 days after the disaster.

He says the surgery volume is tapering down now. Time to get the non-surgical medical pipeline open at full throttle.

That’s all for today.

Jim