DART medics reach out to mountain community
By Captain Mark Peebles
Cpl Richard Alam of the Canadian Forces Health Services Centre in Ottawa dresses a leg injury for a woman during a village outreach visit by a DART Mobile Medical Team.
Performing a traditional secondary duty of military chaplains, DART padre Capt Shaun Turner checks in customers for a Mobile Medical Team conducting a walk-in clinic in the mountains near Jacmel.
A tiny earthquake survivor gets a check-up from Cpl Petra Sutton of 32 Canadian Forces Health Services Centre in Toronto during a village outreach visit by a DART Mobile Medical Team.
Tom Gato, Haiti (31 January 2010) - For the first time since arriving in Haiti, medics from the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) left their clinic in Jacmel to see patients who can’t come to town to see them.
A team of 10 medical technicians, one doctor and one health care administrator took two mini-buses from Jacmel and drove 12 steep, winding kilometres up a one-lane road to Tom Gato, a town on the very top of a mountain. Arriving at 9:00 a.m., within an hour the medics had their three-bay walk-in clinic set up on a veranda at the École nationale de Fondoies.
The two-story school building sported monstrous cracks, and classroom calendars still showed the date ‘12 January’. Eight hundred students were in class when the earthquake struck. According to teacher Séjour Attilus, who also represents the Haitian Ministry of the Interior in Tom Gato, the tremor killed 26 and wounded 90 of the town’s 7,000 residents.
Men and women, old and young, filed through the compound gate. Some had injuries suffered during the earthquake, but many came with problems arising from difficult living conditions. All were treated by medical staff who were just as happy to get to Tom Gato as the people were to see them.
The area apparently has no doctors. “If someone here needs medical help, they either have to go to Léogâne or Jacmel,” said Mr. Attilus.
The need for medical help was noted during a reconnaissance by health care administrator Lieutenant (Navy) Nic Gauthier of 33 Canadian Forces Health Services Centre in Kingston, Ontario, who said the intent now is to reach beyond Jacmel into the surrounding countryside.
“Now that we’re established with the clinic at the port (in Jacmel), it is time for us to cover our area of operations,” he said.
By 2:00 p.m., when the clinic closed, 136 people had been treated and the medics were planning to return the next day.
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