Earthquake doesn't shake Nashville missionary program in Haiti

Dr. Don Lafont offers medial assistance while nurse Lynn Blair-Anton looks on in the background. Photo by Billy Shields

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Jutting from the blackened wreckage of a two-story house was the naked spine of 66-year-old Frederic Brutus, a lottery ticket salesman and resident of the area near Carrefour-Feuille. His exposed remains were an ominous talisman marking the horror of one of the city’s most devastated neighborhoods.

When the Jan. 12 earthquake struck, Brutus’ upper body was gnarled by the house’s top story as though caught in the jaws of some terrible dragon. No one could remove his corpse from the ruins, and it started to rot in the open. After a week, neighbors reluctantly doused it in gasoline and torched the house to kill the stench.

But from nearby Brutus’ charred remains on a recent Saturday morning, you could hear a few words in Creole shouted with a distinct Tennessee drawl:

“SWEEEEEEVAWNT! DE medicamawnt, CHAWK jouw …,” Dr. Don Lafont told one patient. Lafont and nurse Lynn Blair-Anton, from St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Nashville, had set up a traveling field hospital in the shadow of the wrecked Haitian Red Cross. Walking, sometimes limping, through a blue iron gate and past a woman washing her child in a steel laundry tub, the sick and wounded came and waited patiently to tell a 71-year-old doctor and 47-year-old Nashville nurse what ailed them.

Lafont and Blair-Anton were part of a traveling medical team organized by Matthew 25 House, part of a twin-parish program founded in Nashville in 1978 by businessman Harry Hosey and supervised from Nashville by Theresa Patterson. Until the earthquake, the house was a way station for North Americans heading into other parts of Haiti, with a few affiliated youth programs on the side. It handled brief travel and housing arrangements for about 350 mostly Catholic parishes that had partners in rural Haiti, which is how Lafont and Blair-Anton began working in tandem here more than 13 years ago.

“I always tell people we’re married, just not to each other,” Blair-Anton laughed.

With multicolored scrubs, a UT trucker’s cap and an impish grin, Lafont must have been a surprising sight in a country where people rarely see a doctor.

Take the case of 14-year-old Jasmine Joseph: The girl’s house collapsed on her as she tried to flee, leaving her with a dislocated right shoulder and hip. With numbness in both her right hand and foot, she gritted her teeth for two weeks without medical attention.

“This late in the game, I don’t know what a hospital’s going to do about that,” Lafont said with a grimace.

Crisis management

Matthew 25 was never supposed to be a major center for disaster relief. But after the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated much of the impoverished country, the agency’s headquarters became an emergency field hospital, a 2,200-person homeless shelter and a relief coordination site.

The property became a microcosm of Haiti’s worst disaster. Quick decisions made on the fly ended up becoming the status quo at the house as minutes ticked into days. Quake victims in the neighborhood began showing up, knowing the house could have medical supplies and possibly medics.

“It was not a me-first situation, the Haitians did their own triage in a way,” said Sister Mary Finnick, an elfish 76-year-old who runs the house with fellow Massachusetts natives Patrick and Vivian Tortora. “It happened over and over again.”

In one case Finnick watched the mother of an injured child pull her own toddler out of line so that another child with a massive head wound could receive treatment.

Waves of medical teams on their way back to the states had left behind stacks of supplies that the house stored in a gift shop wing that ended up with the nickname “the pharmacy.” The house also had a decent generator and reliable communications.

“It was like the loaves and the fishes,” Finnick said. “We had more than what you’d consider a medicine chest.”

The medicines were there but they were hard to reach. The earthquake buried them under a pile of shelves and dumped a bottle of hydrochloric acid all over the pharmacy floor. The house ran out of peroxide, which Vivian Tortora replicated with a solution of vinegar and water. It was dark — a trickle of diesel fueled a generator that powered only a few lights in the kitchen. The dining room table became an operating table that was the site of an emergency foot amputation. The first foreign medics to arrive on the scene were Jim Toth and Barbara Burk, from Georgia, who got there within 72 hours of the earthquake. Another medical team from Denver Children’s Hospital arrived around the same time.

As international media outlets reported on violence, looting and rioting, a nun who barely stands 5 feet tall clad in shorts and a T-shirt threw open the house’s doors to Haitians who suffered gruesome crush injuries or lost their homes.

With most of the already ailing infrastructure of this Caribbean country of 9 million wiped out, getting people to medical facilities and shelter became a do-it-yourself operation. For Matthew 25, that operation became the de facto responsibility of Tonis “Tey” Michel, a Matthew 25 security guard who moonlights as a grassroots organizer. Michel is known as the “mayor” of the tent city that has settled in the house’s adjacent soccer field. Michel spent every waking hour after the quake hunting down medicine. He caught his first hour of sleep five days after the earthquake.

“The government just doesn’t exist in Haiti,” Michel said. “Somebody has to be responsible for the people in this area.” By the day after the disaster, Michel was taking a census of who was living on the field.

Social capital

With modest means but an extensive network of international and community ties, Matthew 25 became a clearinghouse for rescue efforts, nourishment programs and housing logistics for thousands of Haitians in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Port-au-Prince after the earthquake was a bizarre pastiche of broken buildings, tent cities, military installations and international emergency field hospitals. With shortages of every kind, knowledge and connections suddenly became priceless commodities alongside potable water and medical supplies.

An informal system of social capital developed. Patrick Tortora got a patient or two into a Belgian field hospital accompanied by bone-setting gear and some potable water, he said. The Dominican medical mission took a Matthew 25 patient who was accompanied by a few spare pounds of gourmet coffee that had been lying around the house.

Bill Johnson, a 6-foot 5-inch, 250-pound nurse and Air Force veteran who was staying at the house, got a hospital generator fixed by tapping his military connections.

“I got them 3 gallons of bleach, and the next day they sent a mechanic over to Grace Children’s Hospital,” he said. Newly landed soldiers had been worried about the quality of their shower water.

Thanks in part to a clean-water program affiliated with Rotary International, Matthew 25 is scraping together enough food and potable water to keep the people in the tent city from starving. They received word on Sunday that an affiliate of the Lion’s Club will establish a dental clinic and a school on the field. The same day, they received a truckload of food worth $8,000 from Rays of Hope, a nonprofit based in Grand Rapids, Mich.

But the future of the house is still in question. It will need repairs, and it will have to come to terms with all of these new but necessary community functions.

The Tortoras are planning to move back to the states in March so they can be closer to their grandchildren after spending five years living in Haiti and about 28 years doing work there. But they are quick to point out that they will continue to be involved with relief efforts here.

“When you’re doing something like this, you can’t plan a day,” Vivian Tortora said. “There are always delays and changes.”

A constant theme in Haiti always has been the desperate need for long-term medical care, a fact that has come into sharp relief after the ravages of the earthquake.

“When you get a headache in the states, you go to the cabinet and get some aspirin,” Lafont said. “Here they don’t have a cabinet to go to.”