Reply #170: day 9: [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

It is nine days after the quake, and last night three gaunt Haitian medical students, their school destroyed, came up to me in the dark as I walked past the nursing school with 150 nurses still buried in the rubble, the smell of rotting flesh floating in the hot, heavy evening air. They have helped out for the last week at the hospital but had no food to eat and only a little water to drink. Their homes were destroyed and most of their families were dead. Yet they showed up to help. They came to me to ask if they could get a job, a way to feed themselves and what family they had left. But the hospital's personal system is not functioning yet. Our first priority has been saving lives.

I went to get them food; high-energy biscuits (dry cookies) that were dropped off by the World Food Program too feed 5000 people on the hospital campus for five days. The food has been dropped off, but is locked behind three doors and there is no clear distribution system yet. It took me two hours to get them food and then find some more food for the new group of surgeons, doctors and nurses that arrived from Children's Hospital in Boston for Partners in Health. The three medical students slept out on the ground, with home to go back to, and with food in their stomachs for the first time in a week.