CSC<\/span>, and a guest. His hand trembled as he held a photograph taken of the schoolgirls, bunched together and laughing as a nun tried to restore order.<\/p>\nHofman\u2019s voice broke as he remembered saying goodbye to the holy woman who had become his friend. \u201cShe was killed in the damn earthquake,\u201d he sobbed.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was a saint,\u201d Streit affirmed, placing his hand on his old professor\u2019s shoulder.<\/p>\n
A biology professor and director of the Notre Dame Haiti Program, \u201cPere Tom\u201d has called Saint Rose of Lima home for much of the last 17 years while conducting tropical disease research in Haiti, where healthcare has long lagged badly even behind other poor nations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sister in the picture was killed, too,\u201d Streit said. So were two others. \u201cHopefully the students were not, because that was the morning group. The afternoon group, about 150 kids were killed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hope crumbles<\/h3>\n
According to government estimates, the \u201cdamn earthquake\u201d of January 12 claimed the lives of some 230,000 Haitians. While frequent tremors terrified survivors in the month after the disaster, an estimated 300,000 received treatment for injuries. Tens of thousands more face a perilous future that promises battles with infected injuries and disease aggravated by dehydration, malnutrition, heavy spring rains and the merciless sun.<\/p>\n
The devastation also directly hit the Notre Dame family. Emmanuel Guillaume, a Haitian seminarian of the Congregation of Holy Cross \u2014 which has served Haiti since 1944 \u2014 died instantly. John Kloos \u201974 lost his son, Ryan, 24, and rushed to the hospital in Miami where his daughter, Emily, 26, was admitted with life-threatening injuries. The siblings were serving in Haiti with Friends of the Orphans, an international children\u2019s aid organization.<\/p>\n
The disaster destroyed nearly everything in a relatively small area of the country that happens to be its most populous. Look at a map of Haiti and imagine it as an outstretched hand, thumb in the north and palm in the south. L\u00e9og\u00e2ne, the small, coastal city closest to the epicenter of the 7.0 quake, rests in the palm\u2019s inner curve, about 18 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince.<\/p>\n
Two of the very few buildings left standing in L\u00e9og\u00e2ne house the Haiti Program, where Father Streit \u201980, \u201985M.Div., \u201994Ph.D. and his staff of 35 labor with realistic hope of ridding the country of lymphatic filariasis (LF), a mosquito-borne, parasitic disease that can cause the grotesque swelling of the legs, female breasts and male genitals known as elephantiasis. Though rarely fatal, the deformation often leaves victims debilitated and ostracized.<\/p>\n
The evening the earthquake struck, Streit and several members of his staff were in Port-au-Prince attending a conference of Notre Dame\u2019s partners in the fight against LF at the Hotel Montana. The tone was upbeat. Participants outlined plans to treat preventatively half of Haiti\u2019s nine million people by the end of the year and eradicate the disease later in the decade. Relaxing after an early adjournment, Streit, Sarah Craig \u201998MSA, Logan Anderson and Marie-Denise Milord, a Haitian doctor and public health official studying at Notre Dame on a Fulbright scholarship, survived the hotel\u2019s instant collapse. Streit made phone contact with Notre Dame and then lost touch for several days.<\/p>\n
In L\u00e9og\u00e2ne , program acting director Jean-Marc Brissau\u2019s sense of isolation deepened. Initially forgotten as international relief organizations rushed to the broken capital, L\u00e9og\u00e2ne had no airport to receive supply planes. With no cell phone service or Internet connection at Residence Filariose, the two-story house where community leaders had gathered for LF information meetings and Hofman and other guests had stayed during visits, Brissau \u201908LLM watched as thousands of homeless neighbors gathered in tents and makeshift shelters outside the compound in search of food, water and medical assistance.<\/p>\n
Brissau mobilized the staff, offered what he could to the refugees and worked to re-establish communication. When by the weekend it came time to find a place for relief planes to land, he identified a stretch of road he remembered drug runners using as a runway for cocaine drops. He contacted U.N. officials, who dispatched troops to provide security escorts and crowd control.<\/p>\n
That is how, when help finally arrived in L\u00e9og\u00e2ne six days after the quake, Notre Dame found itself in a unique position to support the relief effort. To the doctors who flew in with food and medicine on single-engine planes, the ND haven seemed nothing short of providential.<\/p>\n
The summons<\/h3>\n
Ralph Pennino \u201975 had been there before. So had Kevin Olehnik \u201978, Marty Dineen \u201974 and several other doctors who responded to Pennino\u2019s summons in the weeks after the earthquake.<\/p>\n
Pennino, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, is founder and president of InterVol, a Rochester, New York-based network of healthcare providers and volunteers that coordinates and delivers medical care, supplies and professional support to places around the globe in need of it. He led three missions to Haiti in the 1990s and returned again in 2008 with Emil Hofman.<\/p>\n
After his 2007 Hofman trip, Olehnik had stepped out of his orthopedic specialty to draft teams of urologists who, like Dineen, perform hydrocele surgeries on male victims of elephantiasis. He was among the first to respond to Pennino\u2019s call for a team of surgeons and anesthesiologists, including Daniel Towle \u201977, who could relieve the agony building up outside the Notre Dame compound.<\/p>\n
While InterVol volunteers packed supplies and medicines donated by Rochester General Hospital and contacts around the country, the doctors petitioned their own networks for medicine and equipment. The response was overwhelming. A Rochester wine distributor, Constellation Brands, offered its corporate jets to shuttle the volunteers and their supplies to the staging airport in Haiti\u2019s neighbor, the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n
Pennino arranged for another donation of air transport from the DR with Tradewind Aviation, a charter flight company, enabling doctors on L\u00e9og\u00e2ne Team I to arrive in Haiti nine days after the earthquake. Landing on the highway outside town, the plane was rushed by locals desperate for food and water. Surrounded by armed U.N. soldiers, the doctors and flight crew hastily loaded 3,000 pounds of supplies and food onto trucks for the 15-minute trip into town.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe traveled in silence, basically because the moment we hit the city I think everybody was just absolutely horrified and in awe of what they were seeing,\u201d said anesthesiologist Towle, a 25-year veteran of international medical work. \u201cNothing prepared you for this.\u201d<\/p>\n
People were still trapped inside the pancaked buildings. Signs lined the road: \u201cPlease America, help us.\u201d \u201cWelcome America.\u201d \u201cWelcome Marines.\u201d Inside the compound, Pennino\u2019s group found that other teams of physicians had set up operations in the nursing school adjacent to Residence Filariose. They could hear the screams of patients enduring amputations performed without anesthesia.<\/p>\n
Pennino and Olehnik scrubbed up to help with a complicated hand crush surgery, and Towle\u2019s medical partner Catherine Powers provided the anesthetic. Towle claimed some \u201creserved\u201d vacant rooms and began tearing open boxes and throwing supplies around to establish turf. The team pulled tables together and set up operating rooms for its first full day of surgery.<\/p>\n
The first InterVol team performed 120 surgeries over the next 10 days. Until Towle found a local supplier, he and Powers anesthetized patients without benefit of oxygen. Electricity was limited to a few hours a day. Temperatures soared to the high 100s. The rudimentary sterilization procedures available to the Haitian nurses who stayed to help rather than leaving to find their families were undone by sweat and dust and the fans that drew air in through vents 15 feet away from the tent city growing outside the OR walls.<\/p>\n
When the tremors shook \u2014 three or four times each day \u2014 dogs began to howl. Mothers cried for their children. Those who had roofs were afraid to sleep under them. But at 4 o\u2019clock every morning, the doctors heard hymns of praise rise up outside the gate. \u201cIt\u2019s a Catholic country,\u201d Towle said. \u201cSome sort of leader would show up, and people would gather. We laughed about it the day it didn\u2019t start until 4:30, wondering, was he late?\u201d<\/p>\n
Between the dogs and the roosters, sleep was hard to find. The doctors rose by 6 in air that hung like wet wool. At daylight, patients arrived. Families carried their wounded on blankets and tree limbs. Some made their own way on homemade crutches. Others came in the arms or Humvees of U.S. Marines, or the trucks that circulated through nearby villages to pick up the sick and wounded. In the field hospital that a medical team from Iowa set up in the ND yard, doctors treated a steady flow of 300 outpatients per day.<\/p>\n
The surgeons, through translators, had to console their patients several times before they could operate. \u201cWe had patients who said, \u2018No. You\u2019re going to cut off my foot. I\u2019d rather go home and die,\u2019\u201d Towle recalled. The team kept them around until they relaxed and learned to trust. Towle took a picture of one fearful woman\u2019s repaired feet to show her when she awoke after surgery. \u201cWe both burst into tears,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
At night, the doctors gathered around a fire of burning trash with their colleagues from World Wide Villages, Save the Children and the Children\u2019s Nutrition Program. They drank hot Haitian beer and traded stories and ideas.<\/p>\n
The first surgical team at \u201cL\u00e9og\u00e2ne Shock Trauma Hospital,\u201d as its staff came to call it, performed only two limb amputations. They pronounced three deaths; one was a 100-year-old woman whose body couldn\u2019t handle the antibiotic fighting her infection. They delivered babies, many premature, the mothers\u2019 bodies unable to withstand the fatigue, stress and hunger. Most made it. Some didn\u2019t. The ones who did were balm. \u201cI loved it,\u201d Towle said. \u201cAmidst all the death and tragedy, a baby was being born. Hopefully into a decent world. Who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n
When Team II flew into \u201cL\u00e9og\u00e2ne International Airport\u201d \u2014 the name another instance of field humor \u2014 Towle and Olehnik stayed behind a day to orient the new team. The weather cooled. As the disaster neared one month, demand for trauma care began to subside at the ND compound and the other field hospitals operating in town. \u201cOur biggest concern is post-op healing,\u201d Pennino wrote in one of his regular email dispatches. \u201cWe have no inpatient capability and patients are sent back home \u2014 aka refugee camp \u2014 to return for post-op wound checks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ricocheting between Rochester and L\u00e9og\u00e2ne, Pennino continued to recruit doctors and donors via InterVol. At Notre Dame, valedictorian Brennan Bollman \u201909 had taken leave from her first year at Harvard Medical School to coordinate offers of medical help through the Haiti Program office. Word of the response effort \u2014 and of Notre Dame\u2019s role in it \u2014 was spreading through informal networks as well as such established channels as the Tom Dooley Society.<\/p>\n
Five weeks after the earthquake, L\u00e9og\u00e2ne Shock Trauma Hospital shifted operations to an improved field hospital provided by a World Wide Village donor. Pennino reported 7,000 patients treated and 250 operations performed. \u201cIncredible,\u201d he wrote,\u201d is an understatement!\u201d<\/p>\n
Hope endures<\/h3>\n
The ND campus responded to the crisis with creativity and determination, beginning with a well-attended Mass for Haiti on January 18. The University raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars in donations, gate receipts and concessions revenue at the men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball games the following weekend.<\/p>\n
Students took up a collection at a faculty panel on Haiti. Others put together a benefit concert, a tent-and-tarp collection in conjunction with South Bend-area Boy Scouts, and a \u201cPolar Bear Plunge\u201d in which 100 undergrads dipped into the 40-degree waters of Saint Joseph Lake. Senior Jeffrey Lakusta secured commitments from wineries to donate a cut of their sales to relief agencies.<\/p>\n
Much of this money supported immediate relief efforts. But the University had already begun to think about its long-term role in Haiti, where the disaster crumpled hospitals, schools and churches as indiscriminately as people\u2019s homes.<\/p>\n
No longer a missionary effort, Holy Cross\u2019 presence in Haiti is native-born and growing fast. The pain of seminarian Guillaume\u2019s death was compounded for his religious brothers and sisters by the destruction of the provincial house. Many of the eight parishes and 10 schools the order serves were badly damaged.<\/p>\n
Hope and vision at Residence Filariose are as strong and tall as walls that withstood the January 12 quake, thanks to Father Streit\u2019s consultations with ND civil engineering Professor Yahya Kurama earlier in the decade. For now, Haiti Program staff have become relief workers. Like their partners in the Haitian government and a cluster of cooperating organizations, they recognize that fractures and flesh wounds come before LF treatments, deworming and iodine deficiency in the triage line.<\/p>\n
Still, Streit believes the program can press its effort outside the West Department, the district that encompasses the nation\u2019s worst structural damage. Even the Port-au-Prince warehouse where the program subsidizes the production and sale of salt fortified with iodine and the antiparasitic drug that fights LF is structurally sound and operable. With support, Streit thinks Haiti Program clinicians could add critical services like bednets, malaria drugs, Vitamin A and iron.<\/p>\n
He is sensitive to the impact relief efforts can have on Haitian institutions. H\u00f4pital Sainte Croix, his lead research partner in L\u00e9og\u00e2ne, was already struggling before the disaster. Once it rebuilds, it may have to compete with sturdier relief organizations just to stay open for that day when the last foreign medical teams depart. The competition extends to personnel. Streit himself lost two recent hires to Doctors Without Borders, \u201cbut I\u2019m happy that they\u2019re working to help get us out of this situation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He trusts that experienced agencies share the ethic of \u201cbuilding local capacity\u201d \u2014 training and employing Haitians to do most of the work, a key component of the Haiti Program\u2019s success to date. It\u2019s important, he says, to make sure Haitians are prepared to build a future in which healthcare, education, business and government function radically better than they did in the pre-January 12 past.<\/p>\n
Once Haiti\u2019s emergency needs lessen, capable volunteers are welcome. Notre Dame Professor Karen Richman has posted Creole language course materials at the University\u2019s open courseware site, ocw.nd.edu, for cooperative self-starters ready to do anything from dropping a well to building homes and churches to comforting orphaned children. Streit likes the idea of something like a Hofman trip for non-medical personnel so people can think about how to plug in.<\/p>\n
Hofman himself yearns to return. \u201cI\u2019m 88 years old, and I want to do with the rest of my life what is worthwhile,\u201d he said in February, sitting in his blue ND parka and sipping soup in Corby Hall. \u201cI found what is worthwhile, and it\u2019s what we were doing there. Very, very much so.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nJohn Nagy is an associate editor of this magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sister Esta Joseph, C.J., baked a cake and a pizza whenever she knew Emil Hofman was coming. Over the past six years, Sister turned out a lot of cakes and pizzas. Hofman made a point of visiting her at Saint Rose of Lima parish school every time he visited L\u00e9og\u00e2ne, Haiti. The legendary Notre Dame […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4250,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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