Patients were crammed into patios, corridors, verandas, and hallways at a hospital in southwestern Haiti, where a violent earthquake devastated homes, shops, and other structures over the weekend.
Then, because of the hospital's poor conditions, administrators were compelled to move them as best they could due to an impending storm forecast to bring severe rainfall Monday night.
Even those patients were fortunate in some ways. On Monday, Haiti's Civil Protection Agency raised the dead toll from Saturday's earthquake to 1,419 people, with 6,000 people injured, many of whom have had to wait for aid in the sweltering heat, even on an airport tarmac.
“We had planned to put up tents (on hospital patios),” said Gede Peterson, director of Les Cayes General Hospital.
This isn't the first time that employees have had to improvise. The morgue's refrigeration had been broken for three months, but following the earthquake on Saturday, personnel had to store up to 20 remains in the cramped room. Most were soon taken to private embalming services or immediate burial by relatives. Only three bodies remained at the mortuary on Monday.
The quake, which struck about 125 kilometers (80 miles) west of Port-au-Prince, nearly destroyed some villages and created landslides that delayed rescue attempts in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. When the earthquake struck, Haitians were already dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, gang violence, rising poverty, and political unrest in the aftermath of President Jovenel Moise's killing on July 7.
With the arrival of Tropical Depression Grace, which is expected to bring strong winds, heavy rain, mudslides, and flash flooding, the destruction could quickly intensify. Light rain began falling in Les Cayes Monday evening, but the Civil Protection Agency warned that it might exceed 15 inches (38 cm) in some locations. Rain was already falling heavily in Port-au-Prince.
“Right now, we're working to make sure that the resources we have get to the places that are hardest hit,” said agency chief Jerry Chandler, referring to the municipalities of Les Cayes and Jeremie, as well as the Nippes department in the country's southwest.
Three days after the earthquake, injured earthquake victims continued to pour into Les Cayes' overburdened general hospital. Patients waited for treatment on stairwells, corridors, and the open veranda of the hospital.
Dr. Paurus Michelete, who had treated 250 patients and was one of only three doctors on call when the earthquake struck, said, “They are almost always generally infected after two days.”
Meanwhile, in this coastal town, rescuers and scrap metal scavengers crawled into the floors of a collapsed hotel Monday, where 15 dead had already been recovered. Jean Moise Fortune, whose brother, a major politician and hotel owner, was killed in the quake, suspected there were more individuals buried beneath the wreckage.
However, finding survivors seems doubtful based on the magnitude of voids that employees gingerly gazed into, which were perhaps a foot (0.3 meters) in depth.
Les Cayes people searched destroyed houses for scrap metal to sell as jobs, fuel, and money ran out. Others awaited money wired from overseas, which had been a lifeline for Haiti's economy even before the earthquake.
Anthony Emile stood in line for six hours with dozens of others, hoping to receive money his brother had wired from Chile, where he had been working since Haiti's last earthquake.
“We've been waiting for it since the morning, but there are too many people,” Emile, a banana farmer, said, adding that his relatives in the countryside rely on him for money to survive.
Dreadful circumstances
The general hospital's efforts to treat the injured were hampered by a lack of pain relievers, analgesics, and steel pins to fix fractures, according to Michelete.
He stated, "We are saturated, and people keep coming."
Josil Eliophane, 84, knelt on the hospital stairs, clutching an X-ray of his shattered arm bone and begging for pain relief.
Michelete said he'd give Eliophane, who had run out of his house as the quake struck only to have a wall fall on him, one of his few remaining bullets.
Patients sat on beds and mattresses on the hospital's open-air veranda, hooked up to IV bags of saline solution. Others slept in the garden, shielded from the scorching sun by bed covers. During a coronavirus outbreak, neither the patients nor the caregivers used face masks.
Officials claimed the magnitude 7.2 earthquake destroyed more than 7,000 homes and damaged over 5,000 others, displacing more than 30,000 people. Hospitals, schools, offices, and churches were also damaged or destroyed.
Local officials in the beachside region of Martissant had to negotiate with gangs to enable two aid convoys per day to pass through the area, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The agency described Haiti's southern peninsula as a "hotspot for gang-related violence," where aid workers have been targeted on numerous occasions.
Because of roadblocks and security concerns, the area has been "virtually unreachable" for the previous two months, according to the agency. According to agency spokesperson Anna Jefferys, the first convoy of government and UN employees passed through on Sunday, and the UN World Food Program aims to send in food supplies via trucks on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry proclaimed a one-month state of emergency for the entire country, announcing that the first government assistance convoys had begun transporting aid to areas where towns had been destroyed and hospitals had become overwhelmed.
Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director, warned that humanitarian needs were critical, with many Haitians in desperate need of health care, clean water, and shelter. She stated that children who had been removed from their parents required protection as well.
“Haiti is reeling once again, little more than a decade later,” Fore added, alluding to the 2010 earthquake that wrecked Haiti's capital and killed tens of thousands. “And this disaster comes at the same time as political unrest, rising gang violence, alarmingly high rates of childhood malnutrition, and the COVID-19 pandemic, for which Haiti has received only 500,000 vaccine doses despite needing far more.”
Surviving miracles
Last month, the 11-million-strong country received the first batch of coronavirus vaccines provided by the United States under a United Nations initiative for low-income countries.
As hospitals in Les Cayes began to run out of space to perform surgery, medical workers from all around the region scrambled to assist.
Dr. Inobert Pierre, a pediatrician with the nonprofit Health Equity International, which oversees St. Boniface Hospital, approximately two hours from Les Cayes, said, “Basically, they need everything.”
Pierre's medical team was transporting several patients to St. Boniface for surgery, but they could only transfer four at a time because they only had two ambulances.
The US Coast Guard said a helicopter was delivering medical staff from the Haitian capital to the earthquake zone and transferring injured people back to Port-au-Prince, in collaboration with USAID. Other aircraft and ships are being sent, according to Lt. Commander Jason Nieman, a spokeswoman.
Emma Cadet, 41, a carpenter's wife, watched over her 18-year-old son, Charles Owen, while he awaited an operation on his fractured arm at the Les Cayes hospital. He was one of the fortunate ones who received pain medication.
Nerison Vendredi, 19, was in far worse shape, laying quiet but attentive. Because she had clearly sustained internal injuries and was unable to move, no casts or splints could help her.
There were some miraculous survival stories, but they were dwindling as the days went.
On Saturday, Jacquelion Luxama was bringing his goats to a watering hole when a slope collapsed on him, trapping him under stones and a rockslide that ripped the skin off his hip.
“I started yelling, and luckily some other farmers heard me and came and pulled me out,” Luxama recalled as he lay on a mattress in the Les Cayes hospital.
