(From the UCH Insider) – by Todd Neff
“For UCH Nurse, Brief Stay in Haiti Saves a Life”
The man on the porch was holding his 10-month-old daughter and a photo of a young woman. His wife, the baby’s mother, had died in the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12.
It was February 9, a Tuesday. The child, still breastfeeding, had had scant nourishment since. “She’s so sick, so sick,” the man said in Creole. The child looked half its age, Stephanie Houghton thought to herself.
Houghton told the English-Creole translator tagging along with her relief team to ask the man to wait. “I can help you,” she told him, hoping she could. He sat down in one of eight chairs lined up on a cement porch in the Delmas section of Port au Prince, his daughter resting her head on his shoulder. The girl’s life now depended on a box of infant formula packed in Colorado a few days earlier. But where was it?
Project 81. Houghton, 32, does not normally practice her craft on a cement porch under beating sun in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. She is a University of Colorado Hospital nurse in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. But she went to nursing school with a woman named Annie Brown who in 2007 had co-founded a Haiti-focused relief organization called Project 81 with her husband Jared and her brother Clay Nylund. When Houghton saw the devastation on TV, she e-mailed her old friend. They were going down to Haiti, Jared Brown responded. We could use your help.
Houghton and her fiancé John Hudson, a St. Anthony Central Hospital neurosurgeon who did his residency at UCH, began organizing medical supplies, mainly through word of mouth, she said. Chickens cackled, tarantulas crept, dogs fought in the distance. It was a small taste of what more than a million homeless Haitians were living every night. SICU nurse Stephanie Houghton. “I would walk down the hallway and see a wound care nurse and ask, ‘Do you have any extra this-or-that?’” Houghton recalled. “And that person would lead to someone else.”
Soon, they had eight trunk-sized boxes filled with IV fluids, dressing-change and surgical supplies, and medical equipment. One box was filled with cases of premixed Enfamil infant formula.
Others in the Project 81 group, which would number 18 people from around the country, arranged for 700 tents, 500 flashlights, pallets of water, soccer balls for Haitian kids and other supplies. The idea was to set up a clinic outside of one of the many tent cities – each with 7,000 to 10,000 people packed into them – and also help distribute rice and water. Their contact in Haiti, Delmas mayor Jean Gael, said three days on the ground would suffice – they would get in, give, and get back out. Staying longer would just be too difficult, he advised.
Houghton and Hudson left Denver on Saturday, February 6, paying their own way to Miami, Fla. United Airlines, upon learning of their final destination, volunteered to carry their eight massive boxes free of charge. In Miami, they were to catch a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) jet to Haiti arranged by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a fan of Project 81’s work.
The couple arrived in Florida with a wall of boxes around them and 8,000 doses of antibiotics in their backpacks. There was, however, no USAID jet to be seen. A blizzard had trapped it in Washington D.C.
Super Bowl Sunday. They spent the night in Miami, where football fans were arriving in for the Super Bowl, which was played the next day. As football fans poured in, the Project 81 team tried desperately to pour out. They found a cargo carrier willing to drop the bulk of their supplies in Port au Prince on Tuesday for $3,000.
Deal.
They fought football traffic to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. Officials from Banyan Air Service, who happened to have a private jet whose services had been donated for Haiti relief, said the airline could ferry seven of the Project 81 group, plus three of the eight boxes medical-supply boxes, to Port au Prince.
When they landed, Houghton said, “It was like being on a different world.”
There were soldiers everywhere – American, Russian, United Nations, Japanese. Seriously injured Haitians awaiting medical evacuation lay on gurneys in hallways. The humidity was stifling. The Project 81 group had less than half their team, a fraction of their supplies, and no clear idea how they might use even those.
They spent Sunday night in tents in Gael’s dirt yard. The still air was a heavy blanket. Chickens cackled, tarantulas crept, dogs fought in the distance. It was a small taste of what more than a million homeless Haitians were living every night. It was, Houghton said, “just horrible.”
On Monday, the group went to United Nations warehouses for supplies they would distribute. They were presented with 12 pages of forms to fill out – in French – requesting specific details on what they needed, how much, and why. Supplies would be made available three to five days after they were properly filled out, a U.N. official explained. They looked around at a country in rubble. Even the structures still standing were cracked, weakened, uninhabitable. They felt like “tourists in a devastated country,” as Houghton put it.
Clinic on a Porch. Meanwhile Gael got in touch with a New York physician, Junie Bertrand, MD, who had been visiting Haiti when the earthquake struck and had set up a makeshift clinic outside a tent city not far away. She could use some help, Gael told the group.
The clinic was on a front porch, a flat area semi-enclosed by a cinder-block wall. Houghton and the rest set up eight mismatched chairs, some from the dinner table inside the home. Voila – a clinic! Word spread quickly.
A snaking line formed. Some, particularly the young and the old, were carried in by friends or loved ones. A local man at the gate wrote a person’s name, age and health problem in English on a small sheet of paper. The patient sat in one of the chairs while one of the two Project 81 volunteer paramedics measured blood pressure and pulse and wrote it on the patient’s hand. Houghton and Hudson, the sole medical professionals of the group, then went to work.
They saw cholera, shigellosis (a bacterial infection), worms, urinary tract and upper respiratory infections, hypertension and anemia. All were Haitian mainstays, the products of dehydration, malnutrition, and woeful sanitation that were now exacerbated by the cataclysm. Serious wounds had either added to the rising death toll of 230,000 or had been treated already, Houghton said, though she did many dressing changes.
In all, she and Hudson saw 225 patients that day. As darkness fell, two had conspicuously remained, having waited for hours in one of those eight chairs: the widowed man and his infant daughter. “Every time I walked by him, my chest would just get heavy,” Houghton said.
“Please come back tomorrow—we’ll have something for you,” Houghton asked a translator to tell the man. She knew the truck with their remaining supplies was on the way. She just didn’t know when it would arrive.
Houghton watched as the man walked away, his infant girl in his arms, then asked one of translators to call the truck. It was, the man relayed back, two minutes away. Houghton ran out to call the man back. He didn’t understand her, but he followed. A dump truck, which had until recently been used to haul away the dead, was now filled with rice and medical supplies. She opened box number one – the Enfamil. The next day, the man came back to thank her. His daughter was taking the formula. Houghton watched as the man walked away, his infant girl in his arms. It was too much.