The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [77]
On my second day at St. Damien’s, I was passing by a grated window when I heard voices calling me to help. Looking in, I saw eight people crammed into a small concrete room. They were holding down a little boy, probably eight years old, whose leg was a mass of swollen, rotting flesh. Spying the electrical saw in one of the doctor’s hands, I knew what was about to happen. I found the door and went in to help. After talking briefly, I discovered that they had given the boy some Motrin. That was the most powerful painkiller available.
That moment will be tattooed in my brain forever. All eight of us pushed down on the boy’s limbs and held his head still as the doctor sawed off the rotting leg. The boy screamed like someone being tortured. A few of his family members cowered just outside the door, weeping. My heart bled for the young boy, but I tried to stay calm and concentrate on holding him down. I knew that it was either a painful amputation or death for him.
After his leg had been hacked off, the doctors wrapped up his wounds in simple cloth bandages and laid him outside in the grass along with thousands of other patients. Amputations like that were being performed every half hour. At the time, most hospitals had run out of painkillers and had hardly any food or even water to ease people’s suffering. I poured out my love and kept repeating the only phrase I knew in French, “Je t’aime,” which means “I love you.”
We spent two nights at the jungle house, but it wasn’t secure. Late on the second evening, a few Haitians tried to sneak into our compound. They knew that we had food and supplies, and they were determined to take what they could, even if they had to resort to violence. Our police bodyguards, along with Sean and Jim, managed to scare the intruders off with guns, but the police confessed to us the next morning that their weapons had no bullets. If the looters returned, we could be hurt or even killed.
In the wee hours of the morning, I was awoken again by angelic singing. At first light, I set off with Oscar, Sean, Maria, and a bodyguard to find the people waiting in line. As we searched, we stumbled across the new home of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne division, which was on land that belonged to a private golf club called the Club de Pétionville. A ritzy area in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, Pétionville had suffered significantly less damage than the rest of the city during the quake, in large part due to better construction. When the concrete walls of the private golf club had fallen down, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 displaced Haitians had moved onto the rubble-free grass of the golf course. The area around the clubhouse was easy for the military to secure since it had a helicopter landing and sat high atop a hill overlooking the golf course. When the 82nd Airborne found this location just after the quake, they immediately rented it from the club and set up their operations on the tennis courts. One of the surviving buildings even had a bathroom with a few toilets and shower inside that functioned when the club owner could get water pumped in. It was there at Pétionville Club that we found the people who had sung out in the night.
Sean sat down with Lieutenant Colonel Foster to figure out if we could help. Lieutenant Colonel Foster explained that a small team of DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team) doctors and medics had come with them and had set up a hospital on the hillside. They had hardy cloth tents, stretchers, bags of medical supplies, and had been venturing out to treat the wounded. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel Foster said, they needed more medical help. Since they needed help and we needed their protection, a deal was made. We got our own tennis court to live on in exchange for assisting with the hospital and cooperating with the military in other relief efforts.
The next day, the military showed up at our jungle house with