The night before Jacqueline Hutchison and a team of doctors and firefighters from across Alberta travelled to the earthquake-ravaged Republic of Haiti they received an important phone call from the organizer in charge of their trip.
A gang shooting had just occurred in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas of the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where the group’s medical clinic was located and where they would spend two weeks, starting Jan. 24.
“She said she understood if people wanted to back out or if there was any need to have a reason not to go,” Hutchison, a Canmore EMT/firefighter, recalled. “It certainly made me think only briefly about it because I have experienced unrest in other parts of the world.
“There was some hesitation and I had a long talk about it with my partner and son, but at no time did I think I wasn’t going to go.”
As part of the Diakonos Retreat Society, a Calgary-based non-profit charitable organization that provides support, relief and encouragement in countries like Haiti and Mexico, the 20-person group of volunteers was about to experience living and working in what is commonly known as one of the biggest slums in the Northern Hemisphere.
Following a devastating earthquake in January 2010, which, according to estimates, killed over 300,000 people and displaced another 1.5 million, Haiti has struggled with poverty, crime and gang violence. There are still around 300,000 Haitians living in Independent Displaced Persons (IDP) camps.
“As we were flying over and looked down onto what looked like a paradise until you are just about to land, you realized the rooftops you’re looking at aren’t exactly roofs of houses, they’re just tops of tents,” she explained.
“It was the most impoverished place I’ve ever seen,” she added upon witnessing Cité Soleil and the IDP camps for the first time. “Those camps don’t really have any structure. They’re lucky if they have a water source. They certainly don’t have flush toilets.
“One of the camps I saw actually had outhouses, but once they’re full there wasn’t any source of emptying them. There are some spots that are just filthy.”
Hutchison and her team were set up in a guesthouse surrounded by 15- to 18-foot walls and 24-hour security near the IDP camps, which they had to travel through every day to get to the medical clinic.
Each day started at around 5:30 a.m., when volunteers would have breakfast and discuss plans for the day’s activities that included picking up necessary medical supplies.
“Typically, there would be 150-200 people in the morning when we got there and they would line up knowing we rarely would close down without everyone (patients) being seen,” she said about the clinic.
“It was a real mix of things,” she added regarding the patients. “One of the sad things that happened on the first day is there was a mom in line and by the time she got to us her baby had died. We didn’t know if the baby had died in the lineup or if the baby had died before so that was a really tough first day.”
Despite this harrowing encounter and others involving young girls who had been raped while living in the IDP camps, the majority of symptoms reported were similar to hospitals anywhere.
“Ninety per cent of what we saw are exactly what we’d see at clinics here or at a hospital,” she said. “People complaining of high blood pressure, urinary tract infections or they’ve been sick for weeks.”
Each medical professional was provided with a translator, mostly male Haitian medical students in their 20s, to speak Creole to the patients, Hutchison said. Although some patients expressed gratitude to the volunteers, others had a different perspective.
“There is a strong number of educated Haitians and people in power that really just want the country left alone so they can start working on it themselves rather than always being helped by these groups that come from Canada and think they can save Haiti,” she said.
Since the earthquake, the country has had an influx of non-governmental organization (NGO) groups bringing medical supplies and providing care, however, Hutchison pointed out, not having one certain group organizing all the efforts is a disadvantage.
“What I recognize is the importance for medical groups going down there to have a working group on the ground that can say, ‘don’t bring these supplies’,” she said. “They’re so oversupplied with certain things down there.”
With most of the communication to residents coming from the church and word of mouth via cellular phones – mobile phones are incredibly cheap in Haiti with SIM cards costing roughly 70 cents – the public is often kept up to date of where medical clinics are located.
Despite the dangers surrounding kidnapping, a growing problem for North Americans visiting Haiti, Hutchison pointed out the experience volunteering as well as lending her skills and experience has persuaded her to eventually return in the future.
“They’ve made kidnapping a little bit of a business down there,” she said. “They haven’t had any violence towards who they kidnap, but basically they’ll kidnap a white person and know they can easily get $5,000 or $10,000 from their family within a few days and that amount of money can provide a Haitian family everything they need.”
Communicating with locals through the medical service or even outside the guesthouse also proved to be rewarding in knowing that in a country like Haiti, a little can go a long way.
“I found a way where I could crawl up and look over the guesthouse wall where we were. There was a little boy who was living next to the guesthouse and someone from the fire hall provided me with a whole bunch of soccer balls and I took a pump down so I was able to blow up soccer balls and throw them over,” she said.
“That was probably as satisfying as anything in terms of helping people,” she continued. “The smiles on the kids’ faces to get a soccer ball that wasn’t flat and was brand new was a very special thing.
“I think Haiti really gets in your blood,” she added. “It’s not a problem that can be solved with strictly money and volunteer work. It’s going to be a long time before Haiti is similar to any other Western world country. I could definitely see myself going back there.”
Hutchison would like to thank Riverstone Insurance, Ultimate Fit, and members from the Town of Canmore’s Fire/Rescue department for their significant contributions.
