As we took time to pray and read the Psalms before a busy day or uncertainty, I opened my Bible to Psalm 46 by providence. It reads: “1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.” God knew we needed that reassurance!
That morning we drove through very crowded streets with devastation all around to take Isidor to his mother's house to see if they had news of his wife and baby. As we drove we saw the biggest supermarket in Haiti totally collapsed. Many of the employees we knew there died. Looters were risking their lives in the rubble to get things.
We arrived at Isidor's mother's neighborhood and he just burst into tears. His family surrounded him and told him that his wife was injured but OK. They also told him that his baby had died.
While in the neighborhood we asked if there were any who needed first aid. The first two we treated were children. One girl had a deep cut that needed stitches, but all we could do was clean it and put a good dressing on it. She screamed the whole time. The other was a boy of about 9 or 10. As we pulled off the cloth dressing that they had put, we were horrified to see the boy's white skull appearing. A chunk of his forehead was completely missing. Again, all we could do was clean it well and put a sterile dressing on it. This boy was very brave and hardly cried. We prayed for each one first. Of course we told them that both children needed to see a doctor as soon as possible!
After that we treated one lady who had a large cut on her head. We had to shave a lot of her hair to clean it. Unfortunately we could do nothing for her main problem: she was paralyzed from the waist down. We did manage to get the neighbors to give us a door to put her on it so they could move her without damaging her more.
As we treated patients we passed out an evangelistic tract appropriately entitled “Tomorrow could be too late.” People were glad to get them and kids ran up eagerly asking for them.
To our great surprise they had wireless internet that worked and that was why we could send a report the day after the earthquake!
After treating several other patients, we left with Isidor so that he could see his wife who was at a friend's house across town. This journey that would normally only take 30 minutes took us over 2 hours because everyone was driving around looking for their relatives. And some roads were not passable. The devastation was incredible and we saw many bodies on the street.
At that point we only had a ¼ tank of gas and all the gas stations were closed, so we did not know when we would get gas again. So I counted the gallons we had left when I got home and we had only 4 gallons to use between our truck and generator!
When we got home, we were exhausted, but still had to set up our beds outside on the roof. We let about 10 people sleep on our roof as well and fed them. That night the brother of the mother of two teenagers (Sophie and James) we have tried to help started to have seizures and foam at the mouth. Johnny had many scrapes and open sores from when his house fell on him, but he clawed his way out and escaped. I had cleaned his wounds on the first day, but compared to what I had seen the night before, they seemed relatively minor. So we were surprised when he started to have a seizure. At first I thought it was Epilepsy, but then I pulled out my handy dandy “Where there is no Doctor” book and identified the seizures as a classic case of Lockjaw or Tetanus. Tetanus is common in Haiti. Many babies die every year from it because they cut the umbilical cords with non-sterile knives or razor blades. In this case if came from the dirt and dust that got in the wounds. In the US medical personnel hardly ever see this because most infants get inoculated for it. During the night, Johnny had another seizure.
Thankfully, we were able to talk to my sister and law who is a nurse and a friend who is an EMT via our internet phone and get some guidance, but the bottom line was that if we did not find a penicillin shot soon, the man would die. So ended our second day.
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