19780: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald:Inside Haiti's hospitals (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Thu, Mar. 04, 2004

AID SHORTAGE


Inside Haiti's hospitals

Violence has sparked a humanitarian crisis that foreign relief agencies are
only beginning to assess

BY JOE MOZINGO

jmozingo@herald.com


PORT-AU-PRINCE -- For a week, Darline Pierre lay on a steel gurney in a
remote corner of the abandoned public hospital, alone and naked on a cracked
plastic pad, too weak to swat the flies away.

Doctors and nurses had deserted the Hopital de l'Université as political
violence raged outside its walls. Only the night watchmen checked in to see
if she was still alive.

The 23-year-old mother lost her baby two weeks ago and was slowly losing
herself to the ravages of the birth.

A second-year medical resident finally showed up a couple of days ago and
hooked her up to an IV with dextrose, but her prospects were still bleak.

The hospital, the only large public health facility serving the poor in the
Haitian capital, has been closed for a week, part of a growing humanitarian
crisis sparked by an antigovernment rebellion that relief agencies have only
begun to assess.

On Wednesday, doctors and nurses, fearing attacks, had yet to show up for
work. But the sick and wounded keep coming -- with bullet wounds, severed
limbs, heart problems, pregnancies. ''We were already facing a chronic
crisis, a silent emergency,'' said Francoise Gruloos-Ackermans, Haiti's
representative for UNICEF, a branch of the United Nations. ``This could be a
disaster.''

The first shipments of humanitarian aid since the airport was shut down last
week arrived Wednesday -- a DC-8 carrying 30 tons of water and medical and
sanitation supplies for UNICEF. Today the International Committee of the Red
Cross expects a DC-10 with similar supplies.

In good times, Haiti's plight compares to war-torn African countries like
Sierra Leone and Burundi in terms of healthcare, mortality rates, sanitation
and education. But when hospitals and banks are closed, entire cities are
cut off, and water, food, fuel and medical supplies are scarce, the country
can only pray to stave off a catastrophe.

''With this crisis, we lost access to three quarters of the country,'' said
Ackermans.

UNICEF planned to deliver many of the supplies to the maternity ward of the
Hopital de l'Université and get it up and running. ``This is the only place
where the poor can go.''

But the Red Cross said the hospital, which has been closed on and off since
December and the subject of numerous attacks, has been racked too hard to
get operations going quickly enough.

''It's too huge, too big, the problems are horrendous,'' said Felipe Donoso,
head of the Red Cross mission in the country.

A visit through the catacomb-like halls of the hospital on Wednesday
provided a glimpse of the awful despair left in the wake of a total
government collapse, just 650 miles from Miami.

In the emergency room, Ronald Degazon lay in a swarm of flies waiting for a
doctor to attend the infected remains of an arm that was torn off just below
the shoulder in a car accident.

He last saw a physician three days before. The smell of infection was
beginning to overwhelm the room. His mother, who sat with him each day,
anxiously asked if two visitors were doctors.

''We can't go to another hospital because we have to have money,'' Degazon
said.

A moment later, a woman named Mirelle Valentin was wheeled in groaning in
pain, shot through the stomach on the street minutes before.

''Where is your stethoscope?'' she desperately asked a reporter.

In the next room -- a concrete space as big as an auditorium -- one man lay
alone, catatonic and clearly dying, skin sinking into skeleton in a stark
scene of emaciation. He could mutter only his name, Gerard Pierre.

SHORTAGES

The babies fared barely better. In the Section des Enfants Abandones, where
those forsaken at birth are kept, the supervisor, Maggie Constance, and her
helpers were still trying to feed them what little food they could scrounge.
Constance names all the little ones herself.

One boy, Jeff, has hydrocephalus -- his head misshapen and swollen to twice
its normal size. He could die any day. ''He needs a shot to release the
pressure in his skull,'' said Dr. Jessy Colimon, who showed up at the
abandoned baby ward Wednesday. ``But each shot costs $400. We don't have
it.''

Next to him in the crib, an infant named Monachy was severely malnourished,
wearing a diaper decorated by butterflies, his skin dry as an old man's,
hanging off the bones.

''Because of the situation, we have to split one day of their food over
three days,'' said Constance. She was awaiting relief from UNICEF.

A total of 20 babies were in the unit, most frail and hungry-looking, one
with infections all over his head from lying in one position too long.

While the situation in Haiti is desperate, there are many people like
Constance scrambling to keep the nation afloat, unwilling to give up.

In the lush fields near Leogane, 20 miles west of the capital, Sister
Claudette Charles is a bundle of energy and optimism, keeping her Asile
Sigueneau for the old and ailing remarkably clean and functioning on the
most anemic trickle of resources.

''We're poor, but we're clean,'' Charles said, strolling through the
courtyard with a big smile. The elderly residents clasped her hand
affectionately.

Rations have been cut back, water is hit-or-miss. On Tuesday for lunch, the
residents would only get a scoop of wheat and beans. It would be their last
meal of the day.

''We try to cook it really well with the right spices so that they can look
forward to eating still,'' she said. Charles managed to get food, after
Catholic Relief Services pledged some money for her. A local nun lent her
the cash until banks opened and Charles could get the grant.

CRS expects to get $412,287 from the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster
Assistance, which it will spread to relief centers throughout Haiti.
According to the agency's leader here, Agathe Pellerin, that should help at
least 17,000 people.

But the agency's effectiveness was hindered when gangs destroyed its
warehouse, looted food at the capital's seaport and stole 17 vehicles needed
to transport the food and medicine.

At the Sanitarium of Port-au-Prince, where a skeleton crew of nurses tried
to serve more than 100 tuberculosis patients, administrator Jean Gilbert
Charles is desperately waiting for help from CRS.

The reality on a normal day at the 63-year-old facility is grim. The wood is
rotted, the windows broken. Patients, rickety and sunken-cheeked, stare
vacantly from their beds waiting for their small rations of wheat and beans.

''Today we could not cook because the place where we get the propane was
attacked,'' administrator Jean Gilbert Charles said Tuesday.

BUDGET CUT

The sanitarium is primarily funded by the Haitian government, but the budget
was cut by 50 percent this year, said Charles. ''For the past two weeks, the
money is not coming in,'' said Charles. ``If CRS funds cannot provide food,
it will be an apocalypse.''

That sense of desperation became sadly apparent on the streets of
Port-au-Prince Wednesday when three aid trucks from the Global Peace
Initiative stopped in front of the National Palace to distribute thousands
of pounds of food.

Several hundred people mobbed the trucks, ripping the boxes open and
fighting for every scrap.

Herald staff writer Susannah A. Nesmith contributed to this report.

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