Andy Hawthorne is safely back in the UK after spending much of the last week bringing emergency medical supplies to the devastated capital of Haiti and nearby island La Gonave.
The team have spoken of ‘apocalyptic scenes of heartbreak and hope’ during their visit.
Travelling with fellow Manchester church leader Anthony Delaney and a team from medical charity Lemon Aid, Andy Hawthorne took 1000kg of emergency medical supplies to an emergency surgical unit set up in Port-au-Prince and a destroyed hospital on La Gonave, an island west of the capital.
The men ended up at the centre of efforts to help badly injured people who had been pulled from the rubble, some after many days. At the field hospital in Petit Goave, crowds of patients waited for hours as medics battled to save lives.
‘We had to transport two young people with broken backs in a flat back truck over roads ripped apart by the quake. One of them, paralysed when his house fell on him, was carried to us on a door by his friends,’ said Andy.
Finally reaching a better-equipped hospital in Port-au-Prince, they found it overflowing with 2,000 patients. ‘It was unbelievable, but we were amazed to see medics from many nations and languages working together brilliantly to help the injured and distressed,’ he added.
The pair also went to the epicentre, at Leogane, to meet with a church leader connected through their links with child sponsorship charity Compassion, through whom they had both previously visited Haiti. ‘It was heartrending to see the pastor standing in the rubble of the school and church he had built. He had lost many pupils and close family.’
They followed a bulldozer down the street as locals were pulling bodies from the ruins, to join 700 in a mass grave nearby. ‘It was an apocalyptic scene, like a Hollywood disaster movie. You can’t imagine what these people are going through, but help is getting through and we must help the survivors rebuild a better life.’
Off the shore of Port-au-Prince stands the island of La Gonave. The already impoverished population of 120,000 has swelled with refugees from the mainland, and the only hospital is now unsafe. This was Andy and Anthony’s ultimate destination with the medicines, and they found staff having to look after casualties outside.
Justin Dowds, from Lemon Aid, is a pharmacist who was shocked to find shelves empty of antibiotics and other vital medicines. ‘We got there just in time to save some lives, but we will have to come back from the UK again next week or this will be an even greater tragedy’, he said.
The team then evacuated a nine year- old girl who had been buried for three days, whose injuries were too severe for the overstretched staff on the island. She had half her foot amputated and her other foot was badly crushed.
‘As we flew on a small missionary plane back to the mainland, we were praying that amid the chaos we could find an orthopaedic surgeon. When we landed, the first people we saw was a group waiting to fly out. They were an orthopaedic team. We have to say that along with the misery, we saw miracles.’
Tags: haiti, MainHeadline
