Healing Haiti

At about 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, January 12, Manoucheka Blanc arrived at her home in the dusty Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Nazon from her job as a nurse’s assistant in a nearby clinic. The 24-year-old made her way to the bathroom to wash up before starting to cook some rice and beans. As she stood over the sink, the walls began to tremble. When the trembling didn’t stop she thought maybe it was a convoy of United Nations trucks. Soon dishes began rattling. Then they fell off shelves. This was no longer trembling; this was shaking. Blanc lurched out of the bathroom and ran for her front door. But the ground where she wanted to put her feet kept moving. There was a loud crack as the ceiling above her ripped free and fell.

Three hours later and 700 miles away, Enrique “Iky” Ginzburg, a bearded 53-year-old trauma surgeon working an overnight shift at the University of Miami Hospital’s intensive care unit, headed to the on-call room on the seventh floor to take a quick nap. But before lying down, he logged onto a computer to check his emails. The first message he saw was an alert from the International Medical Surgical Response Team (IMSuRT) a federally organized program of mobile trauma surgeons around the country. The alert was titled “Deploy to Haiti.” This was the first Ginzburg heard of the earthquake in Haiti and the massive number of casualties it caused. Ginzburg shot back a reply that he was available to go. Then he turned on the TV and watched the story unfold. For the foreseeable future, sleep would be an afterthought.

When the shaking stopped in Port-au-Prince, Blanc lay in the rubble of her destroyed home, yelling for help. Neighbors dragged her free of the structure, but could not stay with her. There were simply too many people who needed help. As night fell, she lay there in a haze, her right leg smashed, listening to the screams in her destroyed neighborhood.

Just after midnight in Miami, Ginzburg’s phone rang. It was his colleague and friend, Dr. Barth Green, the chairman of neurological surgery at UM’s Miller School of Medicine, and co-founder of Project Medishare, a non-profit organization focused on building up Haiti’s health care infrastructure.

“Iky, can you get me some equipment and go to Haiti?” Ginzburg recalled Green asking. The two men have operated together, done research together, and socialize frequently. Ginzburg didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said.

There were few people poised to help Haiti as quickly as Green, a small, slightly stooped man whose gray hair is swept back from an otherwise unlined face. Ever since a trip to Haiti in the early 1990s, Green had been struck by the dire need for medical attention there, and the stark contrast with the services available in the U.S., one of its closest neighbors. He began taking students to perform surgical clinics there. In 1994 he founded Project Medishare with Dr. Arthur Fournier, a community health advocate. In 2001, they set up several permanent projects in Haiti, including a rural clinic in an area where access to doctors and medicine was sparse.

Green, 64, would tell the medical students traveling to Haiti with him that caring for the underserved was exactly what their profession was about. That’s what he was raised to believe, he’d explain, and that’s what he expected from anyone entering the field.

And now, as never before, he was living those words. Green’s work in the country gave him valuable on-the-ground contacts. Simultaneously, he tapped relationships he had cultivated with some of South Florida’s elite businessmen, like Hank Asher, a data mining entrepreneur, and celebrities, like former Miami Heat basketball star turned philanthropist Alonzo Mourning, who had access to private jets, satellite phones and money. Mourning was so moved by Green’s work that he enlisted the Miami Heat’s Dwayne Wade to help raise money quickly by approaching NBA players for donations.

Green’s call to Ginzburg, who has extensive experience in trauma and triage, positioned them to start saving hundreds of lives almost right away. And it put the University of Miami and Project Medishare at the forefront of the massive international relief effort scrambling in the aftermath of this hemisphere’s worst natural disaster in two centuries.

The makeshift hospital they built in those frantic first days may very well remain to permanently serve Haiti, a lasting legacy to Green, Ginzburg and all the volunteers they marshaled. Visions for that triage center have evolved into plans to build a $60 million state-of-the-art public hospital—something Haiti has never had.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook Haiti’s most populous city with a ferocity that tore down its buildings large and small. Of Port-au-Prince’s 3 million residents, 1.2 million were estimated to be displaced. The death toll was estimated at 200,000, but there was no way to know. The dead were buried uncounted in mass graves, and untold corpses lay under mountains of debris.

The damage in the capital was so widespread that victims lay in the rubble for days, even if they weren’t trapped under anything, simply because no one could get to them. As a result, one of the most pervasive medical problems was gangrene infecting crushed limbs, especially where bones broke through the skin. Amputations became the signature surgery of this disaster.

Immediately after the tremors, U.N. officials set up a makeshift hospital on their compound near the airport, and for most of that night and next day there was only one doctor on hand. Louise Ivers, a visiting infectious disease specialist from Harvard Medical School tried frantically to keep up with the flood of wounded.

“It was overwhelming, the amount of trauma and injuries. I’ve worked in Haiti for seven years and I’ve never seen such suffering,” Ivers told CNN. “To be a human being and see such suffering is bad enough, but to be a doctor and have no tools, no pain medication, is a horrible, horrible feeling.”

At 7 a.m., back in Miami, Ginzburg tossed a change of clothes, some anti-diarrheal medicine and a book about Medieval Europe into a bag and rushed over to Jackson Memorial Hospital where he met two other people contacted for the trip: Edgar Pierre, a Haitian trauma anesthesiologist and assistant professor at UM, and Leo Harris, a physician’s assistant. They grabbed as much gear as they could—tracheotomy tubes, wound dressings, suture materials, a portable ventilator, antibiotics. Power was not guaranteed, so they needed hand tools. Then they raced up to Fort Lauderdale’s Executive Airport.

Dr. Green and a UM surgery fellow named Dan Pust met them at the airport, where they boarded an executive jet donated by Asher. When the jet touched down early that afternoon, they were the first foreign medical team to arrive. Haitian President René Préval came out to greet them, and they headed straight to the U.N. hospital to assess how many critical patients needed evacuation (Asher’s plane would take a handful of patients to Miami that day). The hospital was in near chaos, people were screaming in pain and grief. The air was thick with the stench of urine and feces, blood and death.

“Inside there were 250 people and one doctor,” Ginzburg recalled. “When we walked in she started crying.”

Blanc lay in the rubble of her house for two days, in shock and pain. At some point her brother Lucner found her. But no one knew what to do; the phones were down and the streets seemed impassable. Finally on Friday a car with two Americans, a man and a woman, found Blanc. They lifted her in and drove her to the U.N. hospital.