Catholic Health World

Catholic ministry responds to Haiti's crisis

Leaders promise long-term commitment to rebuild Catholic health resources on the island

By JUDITH VANDEWATER

The Catholic health ministry in the U.S. has joined in the immediate global response to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, and its leaders are pledging to redouble support for Catholic hospitals and Catholic health and welfare agencies, particularly those with staff, infrastructure and established networks and services in Port-au-Prince, the capital city near the epicenter of last month's quake.

"This is going to be a long effort of relief and recovery, and we want to be actively involved in that," said CHA Chairwoman Colleen Scanlon. "It will take a sustainable cooperative effort on behalf of all the Catholic health ministries."

Health care always has been a scarce commodity in Haiti. Catholic organizations have tried to help Haitians fill this void in their predominantly Catholic country, supporting clinics and hospitals with money, health care products and medical volunteers. Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, CHA's president and chief executive officer, said that, because of the close personal connections forged over the years, the disaster is reverberating throughout the health ministry.

She said of the earthquake victims, "These are people ministry members know personally. It is very clear that this has been a blow to the Haitian people that we have felt too. Our ministries have pulled out all the stops to say, "What can we do? What more can we do?"

Scanlon added, "The sense of human compassion toward the Haitian people is enormous. We have a sense of sorrow, but also a sense of deep commitment to do what we can to eliminate the immediate crisis."

Scanlon, senior vice president of advocacy for Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives, is a director of the Catholic Medical Mission Board. The 13 members of the mission board's permanent staff in Port-au-Prince escaped injury, and a spokesperson for the organization said the staff worked round-the-clock in the early days of the emergency response. The office was structurally damaged by the temblor.

Sr. Mary Jo McGinley, RSM, has many friends in Haiti. As head of Catholic Health East's international outreach program, Global Health Ministry of Newtown Square, Pa., she's made multiple trips to Port-au-Prince and led medical missions in the Haitian countryside. She was instrumental in CHE's decision to help fund the construction of a free-standing maternity building at Hospital St. Francis de Sales in Port-au-Prince. And she championed the rehabilitation and modernization of the hospital as a group project for the Catholic Consortium for International Health Care.

"I'm thinking of the faces of the people that I know, and at the same time trying not to let my emotions get in the way of the response," she said the morning after the quake.

Days after the quake, Dr. Jean Marie Caidor, the medical director at the Hospital St. Francis de Sales, sent an e-mail damage report to members of the consortium. About 30 patients, family members and staff died in the collapse of buildings that contained surgery, maternity and pediatric services, and general medicine. All of the hospital's medicine inventory was lost, he wrote.

The new maternity building that CHE, Hospital Sisters Mission Outreach and Catholic Relief Services had helped build is intact and is being used for emergency surgery. Patients also were being treated in the open courtyard.

Even before hearing the field report, Sr. McGinley and other members of the consortium had expressed a commitment to help repair the extensive damage at the diocesan hospital.

In 2008, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, had personally petitioned Catholic Relief Services for help for the hospital, and that agency reached out to the consortium for international health. Monsignor Miot was killed in the quake, which collapsed the archdiocesan office; the cathedral; and, according to reports, several large churches and seminaries.

The epicenter
The magnitude 7.0-plus earthquake struck around 5 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 12, leveling shantytowns and the presidential palace alike. An untold number of people were trapped injured, but alive under blankets of concrete and rubble. Haitians launched desperate searches for survivors. Without the initial benefit of rescue equipment or heat-detecting devices to locate the trapped, they listened for cries and dug by hand. In the hours and days that followed, Haitians were joined in their life-and-death struggle against the clock by international search and rescue teams.

With communications systems disrupted, in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, members of the Catholic health ministry in the U.S. sought and shared information — some tragic and some a source of great relief — that came in tweets, staccato e-mails and cell phone calls from members of religious orders, Catholic agency personnel and volunteers. Eyewitnesses described the situation as "worse than can be imagined," and early video reports underscored the horrible human toll.

The morning after the quake, Catholic Relief Services staff in Port-au-Prince were still scrambling to account for colleagues and make preliminary damage assessments. The agency, which had 120 of its 340 Haitian staffers in Port-au-Prince at the time of the quake, said it was mobilizing to distribute pre-positioned supplies from warehouses in Haiti and nearby countries. Its kits contained cooking gear, hygiene products, mosquito nets and water containers. Emergency response teams departed from the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

Likewise, other Catholic relief agencies with in-country staffs and first response experience rushed to distribute medical supplies and food.

As Catholic Health World went to press, the Haitian government was reporting the country's body count had reached tens of thousands and was mounting as Haiti filled mass graves with unidentified victims. Among the dead were three Salesian brothers, several of the staff members at their mission compound in Port-au-Prince and possibly hundreds of students in Salesian-affiliated schools in the compound.

Hannah Gregory, a spokesperson for the Salesians Missions in the U.S., said 500 students may have been trapped or killed when buildings collapsed in the congregation's compound in the Cite Soleil neighborhood. A building where women were studying to become teachers collapsed, with an estimated 200 college-age students inside. A week after the quake, Gregory said the organization was housing 3,500 people in its few buildings still standing and developing response plans for the crush of homeless expected to seek help from the Salesians.

Clinicians tended to scores of severely injured survivors in hospital and clinic parking lots — the government had warned people to stay in the open because of the threat posed to structurally unstable buildings by aftershocks. The medical need overwhelmed human resources and quickly depleted supplies of anesthetics and first aid products. Almost a week after the initial earthquake, Dr. Paul Farmer, medical director of Partners in Health, estimated thousands of people were dying daily for want of surgery.

U.S. ministry responds
In the U.S., Catholic health ministry personnel experienced in Haiti readied their passports and clamored to join the first wave in the emergency medical response. CHA, hospitals, health systems and employees poured cash into the global relief effort. (Cincinnati's Catholic Healthcare Partners associates are able to contribute paid time off in lieu of cash.)

CHA member hospitals offered medical supplies to the Catholic Medical Mission Board and Hospital Sisters Mission Outreach and both agencies found means to stage and deliver emergency supplies in the days following the quake. Mission Outreach shipped medicine, basic medical supplies, nutritional supplements, food and hygiene items though Food for the Poor. And the Catholic Medical Mission Board reported that it had gotten several doctors and medicine into Haiti by the first weekend. One week after the quake, it reported having established reliable transportation to deliver regular relief shipments.

The Catholic Medical Mission Board, Global Health Ministry and Boise, Idaho-based Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center's Project Haiti, are among groups expecting to send medical mission teams as soon as they could do so without adding to the burden and confusion.

Given the chaotic situation on the ground, in the days following the quake, Sr. McGinley was counseling would-be medical volunteers from the U.S. to be patient.

"We are not going to go down there and add to the problem," she said. She encouraged ministry members planning to send medical teams to follow the advice of experienced disaster response groups like Catholic Relief Services in determining when and where they can do the most good.

Emergency responders
Sr. Karen Schneider, RSM, an intrepid pediatric emergency physician, was packed and ready to lead a team of residents from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to Port-au-Prince when the quake struck. The team was scheduled to depart on a commercial flight from Baltimore the morning after the quake. The flight was cancelled. Sr. Schneider, who runs Mercy Medical Missions, got a seat on a Medi-Share airplane to Port-au-Prince, along with Sr. Mary McGrory, RSM, a nurse; and the volunteer physicians. The group arrived Jan. 16, and was working in a tent-hospital at the airport, which had become the staging center of relief operations.

Fr. Rick Frechette, CP, a physician who runs Saint Damien Hospital, a pediatric hospital and an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, was with his terminally ill mother in Connecticut at the time of the temblor. She urged him to return to Haiti, and Fr. Frechette began his journey within hours, traveling first to the Dominican Republic because the Port-au-Prince airport was closed to commercial traffic. He flew by helicopter to Port-au-Prince, arriving the day after the quake to begin burying the dead and caring for the injured.

Several of his staff members — including an American volunteer and an American visitor — were among those killed in the quake. Robin Schwartz, Fr. Frechette's assistant, said that all of the children and staff at the orphanage escaped injury. Saint Damien Hospital, a long-time benefactor of the Saint Alphonsus Foundation's Project Haiti, had some structural damage, but was treating children and adult patients in its courtyard. Early on, it had one of the area's two functioning x-rays — a digital image machine funded in part by Project Haiti.

Within days of his arrival in Port-au-Prince, Fr. Frechette was called back to the U.S., and he said he drove all night to board a flight from the Dominican Republic. He told friends in an e-mail that his father had said "my mother needed me in order to die in peace." His mother died Monday, Jan. 18, with all of her children at her side. Fr. Frechette said he planned to return to Haiti Jan. 21.

Copyright © 2010 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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