Help and Hope for Haiti: CPD Family Nurse Practitioner Recounts Experiences of Humanitarian Trip to Haiti
Reprinted with permission of
Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services Magazine, Spring 2010
George Wootton, far right, provides much-needed services to Haitians after the devastating January earthquake.
A Center for Persons with Disabilities (CPD) employee participated in a 16-day humanitarian trip to Haiti following the January 12, 2010 earthquake. Family nurse practitioner George Wootton went to Port-au-Prince, Haiti with a group of 130 volunteers, organized through the Utah Hospital Task Force. He took with him his medical skills as a family nurse practitioner. He took back a greater understanding of the needs of the Haitian people.
The Port-au-Prince earthquake killed more than 230,000 people and brought many homes and buildings down, causing widespread hardship. It was terrible, but Haiti has been kept, and kept itself, a dependent country for a long time, Wootton said. Its people are used to doing without. They were hungry before the earthquake, and they are hungrier now—
but a return to business as usual is easier when people do not have very far to fall.
Business as usual in Haiti would not be acceptable in the United States. Wootton saw corruption—food that was supposed to be free, for example, was being sold on the streets—but he also saw people who accepted their circumstances with remarkable grace. “Nobody asked me for pain medication,” he said, though he saw people who obviously needed it. “There seemed to be an amazing patience.”
Once, at an orphanage, he worked with an interpreter to understand the patients’ histories, focusing hard. A sound broke his concentration, annoying him until he realized it was singing. Th e music went on for twenty minutes as people at the Baptist orphanage sang hymns—in English—to thank those who came to help. “It was truly one of the most moving moments when I was there,” he said.
“It was pretty much chaos for the first couple of days,” he said. Much of his time was spent at the University Hospital in Port-Au-Prince. Many of the hospital’s staff members were dealing with their own personal tragedies, leaving the hospital short-handed and disorganized. Later, when the regular staff returned, the work became easier.
Wootton’s home away from home was in a compound of tents, pitched on a fenced soccer field and protected by the US Army’s 82nd Airborne.
Wootton hopes both to return to Haiti and to involve the CPD in working with people with disabilities in that country. Rough estimates put the pre-earthquake number of Haitians with disabilities at 800,000—the earthquake will surely add more to that number. Haitians with disabilities are often stigmatized, and much of their surroundings are inaccessible to them.
But while he plans to return, Wootton said his view of the international role in Haiti has changed since he went there. “There is always going to be a need for international guidance, but Haiti needs to be healed by Haitians. Probably the best service that I could ever provide Haiti is to be an active advocate for the Haitian people, who are deserving but have been given so little to work with. To that end, I have endless energy.”
~JoLynne Lyon, Media Specialist, CPD
