Reply #165: DR. EVAN LYON: [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

This question of security and the rumors of security and the racism behind the idea of security has been our major block to getting aid in. The US military has promised us for several days to bring in—to bring in machinery, but they’ve been listening to this idea that things are insecure, and so we don’t have supplies.


I’m living here in the neighborhood with a friend. I’m staying with some of my Haitian doctor colleagues. We’ve been circulating on the roads to 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning, moving patients, moving supplies, trying to get our work done. There is no security. The UN is not out. The US is not out. The Haitian police are not able to be out. But there’s also no insecurity. I don’t know if you guys were out late last night, but you can hear a pin drop in this city. It’s a peaceful place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that’s ongoing.


The concern for militarization, the concern for occupation is very real. There is capacity that we don’t have that the military will help us with, and that is urgently needed, because we’re losing patients minute to minute. But the first that listeners need to understand is that there is no insecurity here. There has not been, and I expect there will not be.

DR. EVAN LYON: That was not a mandate from anybody, but we do—we do need crowd control. There’s no insecurity. We need some crowd control so that the patients are not kept from having access.


To this point, the military has not been here. They showed up about half an hour ago for the first time.


This is the main General Hospital for the country. This is the main academic hospital for the country. This is the most important medical center in Haiti. It has been given very slow capacity. We have been improvising for the last four days on the ground with the Ministry of Health, under the direction of the Haitian director, and with our own meager capacity. The international volunteers are doing good work, but this place has been largely ignored. You see the infrastructure as it’s been destroyed.


And in terms of supplies, in terms of surgeons, in terms of aid relief, the response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been sent to places that were, quote, “more secure," that have ten or twenty doctors and ten patients. We have a thousand people on this campus that are triaged and ready for surgery, but we only have four working ORs without anesthesia and without pain medications. And we’re still struggling to get ourselves up to twenty-four-hour care.