The United Nations (UN) helicopter hovered over what looked like a disaster scene from a high budget movie. It was a scene of ruins and rubble, but as the pilot eased the chopper to the ground, the doctor aboard got his first glimpse of what no television crew or photojournalist could capture in all its devastating human horror.
This is Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest and most disaster prone country, and Dr. Frits Bus of St. Maarten laden with medical supplies has arrived to care for the January earthquake victims now existing amidst the rubble of their country and the bits of their broken lives.
"Sad and bad" were the only words Dr. Bus could muster at first, upon his return to St. Maarten this week, after an eight-day stay in the Haitian village of Jacmel where he had cared for quake victims in a makeshift hospital alongside a missionary.
"Things were very bad before the earthquake but now they have gotten even worse," the doctor said. He believes there is much more to do for the people of Haiti and is already planning another trip in the coming weeks and hopes more doctors from St. Maarten will give of themselves to make the lives of a people who have only known suffering a little easier.
"It was a very intense situation," the doctor said of the human suffering. Dr. Bus left St. Maarten on January 24 aboard an Insel Air flight to the Dominican Republic because accessing Haiti from the outside continues to be restricted and difficult.
From Santo Domingo, his contacts arranged a lift for the UN helicopter that took him to Jacmel, one of the worse hit villages in the catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake of January 12.
The doctor chose to go to Jacmel because the area needed as much help as possible because the international aid efforts were concentrated on Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. The capital had seen the most intense destruction and was home to many more people who are now displaced and living in tent cities.
The choice to go to Haiti was simple for Dr. Bus. For more than 25 years, he has had Haitians who reside on St. Maarten as patients. He is fluent in French Creole and feels confident that his was versed in the culture of the people – an ingredient that is necessary and a comfort in times of need and disaster.
Triage among the rubble
On the ground in Jacmel, Dr. Bus headed to the area hospital only to find that the building, like countless others, had collapsed beneath the powerful tremors of the earthquake. Doctors were trying their upmost to treat wounds, infections and injuries in tents set up on the hospital grounds.
"There was no space to work. Everywhere was crammed and the doctors were doing their best," Dr. Bus said with a hint of weariness and concern in his voice.
"There was a severe lack of basic health and hygiene facilities but as a doctor you make do to help the people," he said. "They were short of medicines and space to work."
He joined ranks with a local missionary who had run an orphanage and a school in Haiti. From his base, Dr. Bus set up a makeshift clinic in a shantytown and began to treat the people who trickled out of the rubble with infected wounds and other quake related injuries.
Deeper than earthquake scars
Dr. Bus, who operates a clinic across from Philipsburg Jubilee Library, went to Haiti to attend to the wounds and injuries inflicted by the earthquake but he quickly realized like many others before him that the quake was not the only villain in the Haitian story.
Malnourishment and underdeveloped children, some of whom may not see adulthood, began to shuffle into the makeshift clinic with parents, guardians, older siblings or just the adults who were left.
"Before the quake things where bad and, after the quake, things just got worse," he said about what he had observed while treating the poorest people in the region who are sons and daughters of the first independent nation in the Caribbean and once the richest before its brutal and bloody civil war that even today, hundreds of years later, continue to rip the country apart.
The first wave of patients had injuries from the earthquake such as infected wounds. Not long after, adults and children with the ravages of civil wars imprinted on them came to the clinic. They sought medical assistance for their everyday ailment and conditions.
Suffering of the little children
The children face the worse. Many are already battle hardened. They have lost loved ones, their homes and any semblance of normalcy, even to Haitian standards, amidst the crumble of concrete and debris.
Dr. Bus had anticipated nutrition issues and had armed himself with protein energy bars donated by Tri-Sport in Simpson Bay. These bars he took into the shanty town to give out. "I had to go to them in some cases to give them what I had because they were too shy to come out."
Showing compassion for the people and setting up the makeshift village in the shantytown sent a signal to the people there that someone was among them to give more direct help.
St. Maarten's helping hand
Dick Luttekes of Philipsburg Pharmacy, Joep Groenendijk of Simpson Bay Pharmacy and Friendly Island Drug Store; and the Diabetes Foundation of St. Maarten donated medical supplies for Dr. Bus' medical assistance trip.
Some businesses and foundations that had already donated to Red Cross St. Maarten Chapter did not refuse to help when approached by the doctor. Insel Air assisted this medical effort by allowing him additional luggage at no cost.
Most of the medical supplies were used up in the clinic-among-the-rubble. Others Dr. Bus left behind for a team of doctors from the United States who arrived just before his stay was up. They will continue providing care for the people of Jacmel and Haiti in general.
Red Cross mission
Head of St. Maarten Red Cross Chapter, Ridder (Knight) Bobby Velasquez had been coordinating the relief effort at home. He has also been to Haiti in the past weeks to be greeted by the devastation there.
"I knew Haiti before the earthquake and now it is indescribable," he told a group of donors in Mr. K's Cigar Lounge on Wednesday evening. The cigar aficionados were one of a long list of groups and organizations on St. Maarten that is pooling resources to aid the Red Cross' mission.
Velasquez vowed that all monies collected for the Haiti effort would be "properly spent on programmes to benefit the people of Haiti."
"I saw the hotel I used to stay in flattened and I saw how people got tripped and blocked in the collapsed houses and other buildings," the Red Cross head said with much emotion in his voice.
Arthur Bute of the cigar aficionados echoed the words of many other donors to the earthquake relief: "We wanted to give a helping hand to Haiti because we all need to give what we can. God forbid that something like this ever happens to us, but if it ever does, we are sure others will lend a hand to us."
The Red Cross is seeking to raise over US $200,000 for the earthquake relief while people like Dr. Bus across the Caribbean region and elsewhere in the world are giving a bit of themselves
