UTAH HOSPITAL TASK FORCE: GOING FORWARD:
Because of the extraordinary sign up of volunteers on the UHTF web site (which we kept open to optimize priority medical emergency skills and Creole speaking skills), we hoped we could take a second large team of volunteers to Haiti. Unfortunately, conditions at the Port-au-Prince Airport are drastically changing, and options for both entry and departure are tightening. Food, water, and shelter for the long term are becoming highest priority – and this is not our mission. UNICEF, WFP, and World Vision are now on the ground in Haiti and are managing these elements.
Therefore the UHTF has decided not to take a large second plane team to Haiti
Conditions in Haiti are evolving; some things are now turning to a new (and difficult) normal. Native hospital workers are beginning to return to the hospitals. Critical wound care is believed to have been mostly now performed. Though obviously much remains to be done, such is a many year task which has never been part of the UHTF mission.
We are told that in a few days we can no longer count on U.S. Air Force transport from Haiti to the USA because the military will soon begin shuttling out military personnel who have been on the ground since the earthquake; most seats on the military transport planes will then be allocated to military requirements.
Daily transport assistance by the 82nd Airborne to and from remote areas for our medical teams will no longer be available. UHTF would have to rent transport trucks. Our campsite will be transitioned back to the military for its larger and longer term role in Haiti. This would result in increased camp costs for security, water, food and bathroom room facilities.
We are informed the airport will be turned back to Haitian government control on February 13, further complicating the issue and taking away priority options we currently have. Evacuation efforts by the U.S. Government will effectively end. We would be required to work out landing spots for a second plane in and out with Haitian government officials rather than with the U.S. Government with who we are in good favor. Our confidence in the Haiti government’s control of the severely damaged airport is not great enough to risk inserting the second team.
The volunteer team leaders in Haiti are unitedly unwilling to incur the risk of having a second team of 120 doctors, nurses, and translators stuck in a country with little available food and water, inadequate medical care, uncertain ground transport, increasing risk of disease, and increasing hunger of the populace. Remember, we are all volunteers who are doing this – we have no paid leadership or staff.
Simply put, regardless of how much any of us want to send a second team to Haiti and continue serving the Haitian people, we love and respect all of our fellow volunteers far too much to subject them to a potential situation where we cannot effectively and safely control the length, security, and living conditions of their stay in Haiti.
Those noble volunteers who wish to go to Haiti should now do so in smaller groups under the auspices of Healing Hands for Haiti or other established long-term aid groups. We will work with the HHH leadership to confidentially transfer the names and emails of all those who volunteered to serve with the UHTF. As we have stated from the beginning, all donations for UHTF have gone to the Healing Hands for Haiti Foundation and that 501(c)(3) organization will continue to benefit from those donations with smaller teams into Haiti and rebuilding their medical facility in Haiti.
Our tents and non-medical supplies in Haiti will, upon our departure, be turned over to the Mardy orphanage. All medical supplies will be turned over to clinics here.
We appreciate all those who have volunteered, all those who have helped with donations and all those still willing to find ways to help ease the pain of those suffering in Haiti.
Activity Report
We are gratified and pleased with the success that this mission has brought to the wonderful people of Haiti. We are all grateful to the Lord for the honor of being part of such a great endeavor.
The UHTF (utahhospitaltaskforce.org) team is made up of doctors, nurses, medics, EMTs, building contractors, and Haitian-speaking LDS returned missionaries. The original vision of our mission was to help Utah surgeon (and former Haiti missionary) Dr. Jeff Randle and his charitable organization Healing Hands for Haiti International Foundation, (healinghandsforhaiti.org) to restore some level of patient care at the HHH facility in Haiti. The medical clinic received significant damage from the recent earthquake. Working with the Healing Hands staff who traveled with us to Haiti, our construction team has made an assessment and determined nothing is ever-again usable at the HHH campus except the guesthouse. Our first task for HHH was to make the guesthouse useable and that has been accomplished. Working together, significant intermediate repairs to restore some care capability has occurred.
In furtherance of our original goal to at least restore care delivery at the HHH facility, a Utah company donated a large field tent to the Utah Hospital Task Force which we carried on our aircraft. Our team has erected that tent on site, and the Healing Hands team (who we provided air transport from SLC) supplemented by about 15 medical professionals and interpreters from our UHTF team, have thus far treated several hundred Haitians in need of medical care.
The second part of the original vision was to help all those we could, especially those of our LDS faith. We came to render assistance and express our Christianity.
Within three hours after making camp (during the night) the medical/interpreter teams were out delivering emergency medical care. Two Haitian babies have been delivered in our camp.
Our medical professionals, each linked with invaluable returned missionary interpreters, are performing extraordinary medical services in an exceptionally harsh environment. They have treated hundreds of severely wounded Haitians. Our field teams are providing wound care, infection prevention, appendage amputations, and primary care to infants and children along the side of the road and in refugee camps.
Doctors are treating acute wounds, broken bones, serious illness, infection, and horrendous numbers of amputations. They have also performed dozens of critical surgeries.
Each day over 50 UHTF medical professionals provide the core of treatment services at three Port-au-Prince hospitals. They are joined by these invaluable return missionary interpreters – who themselves have been performing medical functions beyond any reasonable expectation. At the overwhelmed hospitals, best described as somewhat-organized chaos, our doctors are now in charge of two main departments, one nurse is now director of nursing for a several-hundred bed hospital, and one physician is medical director for that hospital. Return missionary interpreters are enlisted in critical patient care and surgery. It is miraculous to behold.
Returned missionary interpreters are seeing wounds so severe some of these doctors have not seen such before, and they are so totally invaluable in translating for doctors and nurses and in giving comfort to frightened patients. The senior physician of a large hospital told me these interpreters are unique in that their language skills are superior to any other interpreters they have, and their love of the people is felt by everyone involved, especially the patients.
Numerous doctors from the U.S. and other countries are broadly applauding these American medical professionals and the return missionary interpreters of the UHTF. A group of Austrian physicians told us tonight this is by far the hardest disaster they ever done; the Army guys tell us this is far more brutal than Afghanistan.
Medical and construction teams have visited many orphanages and several remote villages where medical care was given to several hundred.
Neither space nor time will allow us to enumerate the truly unbelievable healing care these Utah Hospital Task Force team members have provided.
Our construction teams have been tasked by the U.S. Army in assessing structural status at several facilities and bridges. We are constructing a compound that will initially house 100 orphans in a safe environment until their replacement building is constructed. This compound includes a covered outdoor kitchen, covered eating facility, 650 feet of security fence, security gates, outhouses for the children, as well as an on-site graveyard.
Under the direction of the LDS stake president, construction teams partnering with local priesthood brethren are assessing structural damage to LDS members’ homes and attempting to procure materials to do temporary structural safety repair and assist in making those homes habitable again, and in relieving anxiety about the safety of their home and giving them comfort regarding moving back into their homes so they can go back home in peace. We are also, at the invitation of the stake president, doing a demonstration on how to safely rebuild. The rainy season is coming, and there are well more than one million people in tent cities and shantytowns. With the rainy season coming, with its increased probability of disease, the more homes we can make at least temporarily habitable the better.
In addition to interpreting for medical teams, the returned missionaries – acting as interpreters – join the US Army at sentry points, accompany US Army ambulances, advise US Navy evacuation helicopters, accompany US Army / World Food Program food convoys, have set at ease large crowds where disorder was potentially disrupting medical services, assist DMAT in emergency patient care, and countless other interpreter duties as requested by UN, USAID, WHO, WFP, Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and others.
Every morning at 2:15 a.m. a convoy of US Army trucks heads out, accompanied by several Haitian-speaking returned missionary interpreters. Where military and police feared food riots, these gentle former missionaries with their language and cultural understanding and their great smiles instantly calm the crowds and bring peace and order. These convoys carry rice to huge tent cities. Enormous amounts of emergency food aid are delivered each day.
In the daily coordinating meeting of all outside organizations providing aid in country, the return missionary interpreters are the envy of everyone and our most praised asset. Every group is asking us how they can get a few “Mormon missionaries” to interpret for them; we try to respond to every such request.
The Utah Hospital Task Force is incurring immeasurable goodwill for the United States of America and for the LDS Church.
The third part of our mission objective was to assist in the clearance and removal of as many orphans destined for American families as possible. Under indescribable political and time pressures, after meetings with Haiti’s Minister of Social Services, Minister of Foreign Affairs, the First Lady, the Prime Minister, and the President of Haiti, and multiple meetings with the U.S. Ambassador and numerous US officials, we were able to break the long-standing logjam and clear 141 orphans to America. About half of them were headed to LDS homes in Utah. We continue to work orphan evacuation issues through the Haitian and US governments.
Through the stake president, we have arranged for Relief Society sisters to provide laundry services to our team – for pay. This helps them earn desperately needed income and solves our laundry needs. The Relief Society will provide the same service to the US Army at our camp.
The unprecedented magnitude of devastation, field living conditions, and the indescribable human suffering coupled with the stench of death in some areas and surrounded by hungry people, all makes for a physically draining experience.
This team is serving with quiet dignity; it is invaluable. There is a gentle, orderly, professional, spiritual comradery to this team; we all here feel it. Christ-like goodness seems to have enveloped everyone on this team.
We appreciate the enormous willingness to serve here and feel strongly that all those volunteers that are unable to come as part of the Utah Hospital Task Force will be blessed for their willingness to serve from afar the Haitian sons and daughters of God. If this has served to open their hearts and checkbooks, then we are doubly grateful – as this team is fully funded through donations. The team feels they have all brought honor to the Utah Hospital Task Force name.
In a large all-agencies coordinating meetings, a United Nations official remarked “No non-governmental team now in Haiti is as large or as skilled as the Utah Hospital Task Force.”
We can’t adequately express our gratitude and admiration for what so many good people have done to make this all a reality.
