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Northern Arizona Volunteer Medical Corps Helps Haiti Following Hurricane Matthew

Pete Brainard

The Northern Arizona Volunteer Medical Corps has just returned from a humanitarian trip to Haiti. They were treating patients with severe injuries sustained nearly 3 weeks ago when Hurricane Matthew hit the small, impoverished country. Haiti's lack of infrastructure and government have created dire conditions for the people, who are still trying to come back from a large-magnitude earthquake 6 years ago. John "Bull" Durham is a Flagstaff orthopedist and founder of NAVMC. He sat down with Arizona Public Radio's Gillian Ferris for an update on conditions in Haiti. 

GF: You arrived 10 days after Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti. Can you describe the scene when you arrived in the country?

JD: When I flew into Port au Prince, I flew in with somebody who was working with the Department of Defense as the chief of the medical operations in the Caribbean, South America and Central America. And he was flying down to meet with officials in Port au Prince to help see what the U.S. could do to help coordinate moving supplies to and from the southern peninsula which is the area that had been hit by the hurricane. So, Port au Prince itself was about the same, but I did see when flying out of Miami, there was a group from Canada of search dogs. They were going down to search for bodies or survivors of the hurricane. That was a pretty touching moment to see that.

GF: You were able to treat a handful of the survivors who were lucky enough to be flown in from other regions to the hospital in Port au Prince. What were their injuries like?

JD: My role was primarily to provide some upper extremity work. And I saw a number of patients who had bad upper extremity injuries that would not have been treated in Haiti. They don’t have, necessarily, the expertise for some of the upper extremity injuries that I saw; complex wrist fractures, we also saw some patients with lacerations of tendons and nerves, patients who’d been struck by flying debris. One woman whose roof had been lifted off the house and spun around in the air and came down and struck her and severed most of the tendons and nerves in her forearm, and we repaired that.

GF: Your group embraced Haiti 6 years ago when the devastating earthquake hit. Part of the work your group does is to now – from that experience – train doctors and medical staff to have more skills in emergency and disaster-related medicine. Have you seen a shift toward that in these 6 years that you’ve been working with doctors there?

Credit Pete Brainard
Flagstaff and Haitian medical staff work together in Port au Prince to treat victims of Hurricane Matthew

JD: Yes. When we first went to Haiti it was right after the earthquake, and our first 3 teams went down as a “disaster relief” effort. Subsequent to that, we became part of the volunteers helping to support the lack of medical care that Haiti had as doctors left the country following the earthquake. So, we went down, primarily, to provide patient care. About 3 years ago, that emphasis shifted to a role of teaching, and we’ve become involved now with the orthopedic residency programs in Haiti. There are 2 that we’ve been working with training their residents, and we’ve seen a pretty impressive improvement in their skills. We actually had one of the Haitian orthopedic residents come up and complete his residency program here in Flagstaff. The problem is more the lack of materials. Recently, all of the Haitian residents were on strike. They were on strike for about 6 months, and so the general hospital in Haiti was closed down, many of the public hospitals were shut down. These public hospitals are the only place a patient can go to get care. Most of these people don’t have health insurance. There is no government supported healthcare system, and so the residents are providing that. Unfortunately, during the strike some of the supplies at the hospital were stolen, and the government has not replaced those things. So, the hospitals are working now without supplies, without materials, and that may not change until they get a new government.

GF: That’s part of Haitian medicine as you’ve come to know it is plan b, is makeshift, is what have I got to try to save this person’s life. They’re very resourceful without many resources.

JD: There’s a lot of “being MacGyver” down there. They’ve become very adept at this. I learn a lot from them. We had a surgery while I was down there right after the hurricane on a patient – a 19 year old gentleman who had been hit by a tree flying through the air and fractured his hip, and he was 10 days following injury when I saw him. He had a broken hip and was lying in a bed in the hospital. We didn’t have an x-ray machine in the operating room which is critical for reducing the fracture and putting the screws in place. And in the middle of the surgery we discovered that the power drills were not working, and so we had to fix the hip fracture with hand drills. And, the orthopedic residents were nonplused by this whole thing. We went out and grabbed 3 sterile hand drills and fixed the hip fracture, and it actually came out almost perfectly.

Credit Pete Brainard
Flagstaff orthopedist John "Bull" Durham works with hospital staff in Port au Prince to treat victims of Hurricane Matthew.

GF:  This event also affects you personally because you have – one of your children, your daughter – is originally from Haiti. She now lives in Flagstaff. You have 2 exchange students with you also whose families were greatly affected by this. So, this is personal. This is your family. How is your family handling it? Have they been able to contact their loved ones in Haiti?

JD: They have been able to. In terms of my little girl, Annabelle who’s now 7 years old, we don’t know about her family. She was left in front of a hospital in Port au Prince at the age of about 2, so we don’t know much about her family. The 2 exchange students, Nerlande and Bebe, both of them have families in the affected area, so it was an emotional roller coaster. A lot of survivor’s guilt with the girls in terms of ‘why do I have a house? Why do I have food and a family?’

GF: It’s a little over 2 weeks since this hurricane struck. What, in your opinion – your medical opinion, your human opinion – what do Haitians need?

JD: Haitians need a lot of things beginning from food, water and shelter. And there are NGOs down there right now working toward that, but Mother Nature’s not cooperating again with continued rains, continued flooding…it’s making it difficult for people to get there. It’s difficult for convoys of supplies to get there. The other problem is looting. As these convoys are traversing the southern peninsula trying to get to the towns on the tip of the peninsula, they’re being looted by people who also have needs. Not something you can blame them for. It’s just a fact of human life that adds to the sadness of the whole thing. So, I think they need a break from Mother Nature, they need food, water and shelter, and then long-term they need help in terms of rebuilding. A lot of what happens in a place like Haiti has to do with a lack of infrastructure.

GF: You took me to Haiti 6 years ago to work on some stories about Flagstaff’s presence there as a volunteer organization – the 3rd highest volunteer rate in Haiti in the world is Flagstaff. What I tried to find there were glimmers of hope. And, I wonder in this situation, where are the glimmers of hope?

JD: I struggle with that, too. After every trip, or during every trip when I go down and I treat these victims of trauma, and put these people back together and wonder, ‘what exactly am I doing? What are we leaving behind?’ That’s an issue that I struggle with. There was a little boy that we treated on this trip – 10 year old boy – who was hit by a flying object in the hurricane that broke his back, severed his spinal cord and his thoracic spine. So, he’s a paraplegic. He lay on the ground for 5 or 6 days before he was found, so when he arrived at the hospital, not only was he a paraplegic from a thoracic spine injury, but he had a huge decubitus ulcer on his buttock and was febrile and sceptic from that. We were able to debride that and get rid of his fevers, but he has tetanus, and he likely will not survive. Looking at that you wonder, where is the hope? I look at him, and I think about my daughter and how close to a life in Haiti she was. I think Haiti’s hope is her kids. I think there is hope for Haiti, and I think it lies in education. When 60% of the kids in Haiti are not getting an education, I think that speaks volumes. And so, our focus is to educate the kids. This is going to be a generational save. It’s not going to be in the next few years. I am hopeful that Haiti will be able to have a government soon. They’ve been without an elected president now for a year. The elections were due to occur the Sunday after the hurricane, and now they’ve been put off indefinitely. So, they still have an interim government and no real ability to raise funds or disperse funds to help their people. I think educating kids, getting kids to understand the value of voting and being part of the political system, to be part of their country and to try to make a difference is it.

Gillian Ferris was the News Director and Managing Editor for KNAU.