Susan and Brian Walsh were preparing to leave Haiti after conducting a weeklong medical clinic, where their more than 1,000 patients included a teenage boy who had suffered third-degree burns after a kerosene lamp exploded in his face, when the earthquake hit.
“It was like a freight train coming,” said Susan Walsh, a pediatric nurse practitioner who lives in north suburban Glenview.
“I thought a plane crashed.”
PHOTO: Susan and Brian Walsh of Glenview talk Saturday about their experience of being in Haiti when the earthquake hit. (Tribune / Chris Sweda)
She and her husband, a housing contractor, were in Haiti with Little By Little, the non-profit group they created about two years ago to bring a team of medical workers and graduate-level nursing practitioner students Walsh teaches to the Mountain Top Ministries clinic in Gramothe.
When the quake hit, the Walshes sprang into action. They first headed from the house where they were staying to the nearby village, finding most buildings intact and people with minor injuries.
But an avalanche had fallen at a nearby riverbed, crushing the head of a girl about 4 years old, Susan Walsh said. She took the girl and rode on a four-wheeler to the clinic about five miles away. The girl’s father, who had wrapped his T-shirt around her head, rode on the back.
The girl died that night.
“The good thing about it is she was with her family, and they were able to take her home,” Susan Walsh said. Many people have died alone and their bodies stacked alongside roads, she said.
Within an hour of the earthquake, hundreds of Haitians had wrapped around the clinic. At one point, the Walshes were climbing over dead bodies trying to help. They taped broomsticks to broken legs and cut up scrubs for bandages.
“It was one crushing body after another,” recalled Susan Walsh, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “There were dead people lying in the hallway. It was a traumatic scene. It was emotionally and physically draining.”
Her 23-member team worked until midnight that first night. The next morning, people had lined up outside the house where the Walshes and her team were staying. They treated people with crushed limbs and gashes in the front yard.
On Friday afternoon, they went to the airport after the State Department recommended Americans leave.
“Personally, I really wish I was still there,” Susan Walsh said while taking a break Sunday from a trauma debriefing. “But we had to come home.”
They left on a U.S. Air Force cargo plane that had brought to Haiti supplies, troops and rescue workers. After a more than 24-hour journey, which included three stops, they got home around 4:30 p.m. Saturday and were greeted with posters neighbors had made welcoming them home.
“This earthquake and the misery, destruction, devastation and death it brought came from below, but love, strength, help, hope and life will come from above,” Susan Walsh said. “Please pray for Haiti.”
–Daarel Burnette II and Kristen Schorsch
Read the original article from Tribune News Services.
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