30. Have You Thought About...

...going to Haiti? Yes, but my assumption has been that the need is for providers who have experience dealing with acute trauma, and that there have been more volunteers than the infrastructure can handle. To wit, the following comes from an email sent by a rehabilitation psychologist:

"Hi everyone. Just back from Haiti and I wanted to put forth a few thoughts to those of you who would like to volunteer… It is absolutely key and essential that ONLY people who have had large-scale and severe disaster experience go over at this point. Many of you know that I have been to Sichuan--have had many experiences with large hurricanes, Katrina, etc., but I cannot tell you how horrendous and very different this situation is right now… We were doing surgeries almost 24 hours a day....mostly amputations. Unfortunately many of the people who have had amputations have already become infected within a day or two of the surgery (remember essentially no aftercare)... The docs I flew back with came to the consensus that if 30% of the people they operated on survive, they will be lucky... Even the tsunami was in a country where you could find some infrastructure...somewhere. Here--there is nothing. For the first time in my life I truly had to consider [my own] survival …"

Other sources estimate tens of thousands of amputees, which will burden Haiti's health care for decades.