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Representatives from Tulsa-based In His Image travel to Haiti to help with the earthquake relief effort.
Within days of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocking the island nation of Haiti, Mark Crouch found himself on a plane headed to the country’s capital of Port Au Prince to help in relief efforts.
“Initially, I felt like I went on a whim,” says Crouch, a doctor with In His Image International, a family medicine residency program.
Crouch was one of several physicians from the Tulsa-based organization who traveled to the Caribbean country for more than a week to treat hundreds of patients each day.
The earthquake occurred on a Tuesday, and by Thursday, Crouch says he heard a team was being put together. Twelve hours later, he was on a plane heading to Haiti.
“It’s still kind of a blur,” he says a few days after arriving back in Tulsa.
The five-member team flew to Florida on a commercial airline. With the airport in Port Au Prince in chaos, no commercial flights were allowed to land, but the group was able to arrive on a plane from Mission International.
With relief planes attempting to land in Haiti and people trying to leave, Crouch says the area around the airport was chaotic.
“The streets were in disarray, were un-passable, and there were threats of violence,” he says, noting that although the devastation was bad, he did not witness the piles of dead bodies or destroyed buildings seen on the news.
Getting away from the airport was the first challenge, Crouch says.
“Initially, it was very frustrating and challenging,” he says.
Soon, though, the group partnered with the Salvation Army and worked at the organization’s base. There, the doctors treated patients with acute injuries, including amputations on fingers and toes, Crouch says. Infectious diseases — a major worry for health officials as bodies remain in the streets among the living — such as malaria also were treated in children.
On the first day, Crouch says the doctors treated 200 people, and by the end of their stay, the number climbed to 300 per day.
“By the end of the week, half were injuries we were following (throughout the stay) and half a lot of pediatric illnesses and adults with stress,” he says. “We got a lot of people really just frightened. They came for any help we could provide.”
Rev. Joel Leitch, one of the team leaders, noted that most of the people treated had lost at least one family member in the earthquake and some people lost as many as four family members. Sometimes, Leitch says, “a hug is all they need.”
He says the scene he witnessed is indescribable.
“Haiti, on a good day, is not a great place,” he notes of the country, which is the poorest in the Western hemisphere.
The first few days in the Haitian capital were extremely tough, he says.
“There were horrible, horrible injuries,” he says. “It’s just hard to imagine.”
The five-member team returned to Tulsa after 10 days in the country on Jan. 24. A different 12-member team comprising seven doctors, two nurses and three support personnel left Jan. 22 for another 10-day relief mission.
