Day 4

Today we re-visited the Samaritan’s Purse clinic in the area is called Cite Soleil. It has been considered the slum area of Port-Au-Prince. There are no police to speak of because the people sort of live the way they want to and run the area the way they decide is best.

I am told that the prison walls collapsed during the quake and that most of the prisoners who survived escaped. They returned to this area where our clinic is.

No one had even come to check on the area for two weeks after the quake. Medical care had been essentially non-existent.

Click here for Day 3 of Dr. Furman's diary.

This area produced some of the most horrendous stories of the quake. I was told of a family of six who were all trapped and crushed after their home fell. They could talk to each other. They could hear the agony of one, then another. Then they didn’t hear one of them talking any more. Another day passed and no more cries for help could be heard from two more. Finally a fourth became silent. When it was over, two survived to recount the event that will forever be present in their minds, of the silence of one after another of their loved ones, meaning death.

There was another story of an arm sticking out of a pile of rubble. The arm would move and the hand would wave. People tried and tried to lift the slab off the person underneath, but it was too heavy to be moved. They finally stopped trying once they realized the hand had quit waving.

This was Cite Soleil, where no equipment came to lift the slabs away, where people had to watch as their neighbors quit moving or crying for help. This was the area where the most severely injured died first and early.

The pastor of the largest church here talked to Franklin Graham and told him of the dire need, so our initial Samaritan’s Purse clinic is situated here. The volunteer doctor and nurses and pharmacist were excited at their numbers. Today, they had seen 97 patients and led 14 to the Lord.

They were most excited about a mother and her 8-year old boy. She had practiced voodoo and believed in reincarnation. She believed that when someone dies, you burn their clothes so their spirits will be clean and no harm will come from them.

The story came out as she was treated by our medical team. She and two other children had been on the other side of Port-Au-Prince when the quake hit. The 8-year-old son was at home alone. The mother heard the awful news a day later: her house was flattened and her son dead. She mourned and wept. She even burned his clothes and accepted fate as it was, and then left with her family.

A month after the quake a neighbor was able to contact her and told her the son was not dead. Someone had heard him and passed him food and water through a small hole from time to time. He was alive. No broken bones; just dehydrated and malnourished. A few days in the hospital and he was out.

Today, at the clinic with his mom, he looked like a normal 8-year-old boy. One of the nurses asked the mother if she were a believer and she said no. The nurse explained to her God’s plan of salvation through His son, Jesus Christ, and that someday we would all die but God’s gift to us was eternal life through faith in Christ.

After much discussion and praying, the lady’s head dropped and she said she wanted to accept Jesus. I am told she left the clinic still looking downward, remorseful for her ways in voodoo but with the real joy that can only come through the Lord.

At the end of this day, I can’t help but try to grasp what emotional swings this woman has gone through since the quake. I think of Lazarus, and the joy that had to go through his sister Martha when Jesus brought him back to life. And the joy that went through Mary the mother of James and Mary Magdalene when they visited the tomb and realized Jesus was not dead but alive.

I will always think of this 8-year old boy and his mother when I read of the angel saying that Jesus was not there, but had risen. This transformed mother, who thought her son was dead but now is alive, must have similar joy as the women I had just thought about.

But her joy goes even further. She has an additional joy that came from a nurse with the Samaritan’s Purse medical team who shared the love of Jesus Christ. This mother who practiced voodoo is different from the other women. She has an extra joy. She has a joy and a peace in a time of the worst devastation I have ever seen.

I am thankful for that medical team from Jacksonville who gave of their time to minister to these people of Haiti.

He is not here; he has risen! Luke 24:6

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of lined, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “take off the grave clothes and let him go.” John 11:44.

Samaritan's Purse , Haiti , Help for Haiti , Haiti Revisited: A Surgeon’s Diary Day 4