The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [78]
Over the next few days, our camp began to take on a more settled and structured atmosphere. Or so it seemed at the time anyway. Looking back now, I laugh at what a ragtag, makeshift scene it was. The Army gave us several pieces of camouflage drapery to hang over the tennis courts as shelter from the sun. We started to acquire random bits of furniture from the debris: a chair, a table, a few cots, and a bucket for our kitchen. As volunteers came and went, they left their tents behind, so more and more of us had places to sleep and store our gear.
One night I heard a scream from Diana’s tent and went running over to her. Seconds later, Sean was there capturing a huge tarantula with his bare hands. It was a Steve-Irwin-the-Crocodile-Hunter moment as Sean carried the frightened critter out into the bush and away from Diana. Most nights, I heard women’s heartbreaking screams far off in the darkness of the neighboring town. I knew it wasn’t tarantulas they were scared of, but a gang of men who were known to be moving about raping helpless women. The piercing screams would go on for hours. I felt helpless to do anything but pray.
Soon we posted a sign, and Sean arranged for someone to bring baseball caps and T-shirts in with our mission’s name on them so that the Army and others could easily identify us as part of J/P HRO, the Jenkins/Penn Haiti Relief Organization.
As soon as we had settled into Pétionville Club, I coordinated with the military to find out how the J/P HRO doctors and I could be of greatest service. The 82nd Airborne agreed to send several armed men and their Hummers out with us to treat people in the tent villages and on the streets of Port-au-Prince, where people lay rotting on the ground, unable to get to hospitals. Each day, our mobile strike team set out at the crack of dawn in Hummers, and then walked miles and miles through the putrid, sewage-filled streets with our heavy backpacks full of medic gear and our military guards surrounding us.
When we found people with heinous infections and sores, we’d clean out the wounds with saline, douse them with disinfectant, and wrap them up in bandages. It was Civil War–type medicine, and often as we worked, a crowd of thirty or forty people would gather closely around, watching the spectacle. The whole time we’d be dripping with sweat and suffocating from the stench.
On a particularly hot day, one of our military escorts saw me swaying back and forth and raced over to catch me before I fainted, then pulled me away from the crowd. He fed me a sort of homemade Gatorade solution—water mixed with salt and sugar, which works wonders as a natural rehydration mechanism—and within minutes I was back in action. The military watched our backs closely and were our guardian angels. Sometimes we’d find people in such fragile condition that we’d take them along with us for the rest of the day until we headed back to camp, where we delivered them to the hospital. Each time we went out, we felt overwhelmed at how big the disaster was and how there weren’t enough NGOs on the ground to help.
The Army couldn’t afford to use their vehicles to shuttle us about all day because they had important food and water pickups elsewhere around town. So at the end of each long, exhausting day, we’d march back to camp, often five or six miles away, trying to keep up the grueling pace our military guards set. We needed to be back before nightfall because with no electricity or lighting, Port-au-Prince became more dangerous at night. (Even during the day, it could prove hazardous. Sean once got stuck in the middle of an angry mob, and his driver had to use expert maneuvers to escape