Help for Haiti

Another long day in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince was ending when Kim Sykes’s heart was wrenched by a tiny orphan she thought was begging for candy.

“I told him I didn’t have anything,” the registered nurse recalls.

A nearby interpreter explained the child was simply asking to be held.

“He didn’t want anything,” she says, “except my attention.”

Sykes, based at Misericordia Community Hospital in Edmonton, is one of several Alberta Health Services employees and physicians who have travelled to Haiti in the wake of a devastating earthquake in January. The disaster has killed more than 200,000 people and left about 300,000 injured and more than a million homeless.

Sykes spent eight days in Port-au-Prince, working in makeshift clinics assembled from broken chairs, church pews, tarps and torn-down signs.

She joined trip organizer and Cardston physician Daniel Bester as well as fellow registered nurses Deanna Sykes (her mother), Terrie Fortner of the Cardston Health Centre and Anna Lambert of the Canmore General Hospital.

Although familiar with aid work, Bester wasn’t prepared for the disaster’s magnitude.

“It is teeming with people, litter and sewage and yet everyone is so grateful for the help that is pouring in,” he says.

The small team stayed at an orphanage and received daily direction from a local hospital manager.

Clinics were set up each morning, sometimes in school halls and churches. Some were in “tent cities,” with just a tarp tied overhead to block the scorching sun.

“They were really just sheets tied together with dirt floors,” Deanna Sykes says. “Thousands of people [were] living together and making do with whatever they could find.”

She says the clinics were unconventional but well-organized, with triage and pharmacy areas.

Kim Sykes says the patient lineups never diminished.

“When we closed the clinic each day, people scrambled, shouting out their symptoms to try to get some medical advice,” she says.

Between 500 and 750 people lined up for treatment every day. Bester and the four Alberta nurses treated between 200 and 250 daily – about 1,750 people in total.

Lambert was initially overwhelmed.

“I was kind of numb. . . . There were too many people to help,” she says.

Then she spoke to a local translator. He was one of 33 people to jump from the third floor of a college when the earthquake hit; only three survived. The translator returned to his crumbled home to discover his family had been killed. He could hear his little sister crying within the wreckage for three days. Then the crying stopped.

“Because he survived, he felt he needed to keep a positive outlook and help his people,” says Lambert. “That’s when I started feeling we were making a difference; we couldn’t do everything but everyone can help in their own small way.”

Dave Bateman, acute care manager at the Canmore General Hospital, was in Haiti with the Red Cross in February. He was inspired by the human resilience he witnessed.

“We saw a man who carried his son on his back for five hours to get him to the hospital,” he says. “It was a true expression of a father’s love. . . . It is truly uplifting to see people truly caring for their fellow man.”

Trips to Haiti by AHS staff and physicians are expected to continue throughout the spring. Bester, for one, is planning to return.

“Everything right now is focused on acute care but they need ongoing primary care as well, things like diabetic and hypertensive medicine, to help them survive and overcome this tragedy,” he says.

Bateman adds: “I am grateful to my colleagues, my supervisors and Alberta Health Services for allowing me and other staff to assist in this massive humanitarian effort. We are all sharing in the effort.”