This post is part of a week-long series from Engineering World Health, an international health NGO located in Durham, NC. A team of three biomedical engineers and technicians from EWH will be in Haiti from March 14 to 21 to assess and repair medical equipment at five clinics in the Port-au-Prince area. These posts will be written by two of the EWH team members, Lora Perry and Justin Cooper, and will include daily news, photos, and insights from Haiti regarding the state of health care two months after the earthquake. For a brief overview of this project, please see our release on the EWH website. We would like to thank dosmething.org for this opportunity to share our story. We hope you enjoy following our story this week!

Our third post is written by Justin on Tuesday, March 16 after our second full day in Haiti:

Nearly every structure in Port-au-Prince is made of brittle, crumbly concrete. It’s difficult to say from a cursory glance why many of the buildings seem to have suffered only superficial damage, while other buildings of varying size and shape have tilted, slid, and flattened. Not only that, but the damage seems to lack any sort of physical or geographical pattern, with roughly one in four buildings destroyed in interspersed incidents throughout the city.

Many people are sleeping outside for fear of going back inside of potentially unstable buildings. This condition doesn’t discriminate based on class. Streets that were formerly lined with large two-story homes are now full of tents. Cinder blocks are placed next to them to prevent cars traveling in the one open lane from straying into the temporary shelters. Our hosts told us the story of people who were killed last week at a damaged governmental building when they were looting through the rubble and the building collapsed further on top of them.

Today we were at Hopital de l’Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (HUEH), the largest public hospital in Haiti, or the “general hospital” in informal English. Some of the buildings at this hospital took significant damage from the earthquake, and much of the treatment is still taking place in tents despite the fact that many of the larger wings of the hospital have been cleared for re-entry. Patients waited calmly in the grassy patches around the tents to receive treatment under a tarp where the temperature somehow felt ten degrees warmer than the sweltering heat outside. Even before the earthquake, locals would say that the general hospital is where you go to die, but today it did not have that feeling at all. The hospital campus was vibrant and alive with people hustling in every direction and greeting friends on the streets and in hallways.

One of the departments of the hospital that took the greatest hit was the clinical lab used for testing blood samples and diagnosing diseases. Damage to the building cut off the electricity and covered many of the more sophisticated pieces of medical equipment with dust and concrete pebbles. This clinical lab employed a staff of 65, but they have not been able to operate for the last two months, and it’s not known how much of the equipment is still functional, as it can’t be plugged in and tested.

Most of our work today came with a group of four technicians from the hospital. Our team from EWH enjoyed working with the HUEH techs, and we have been glad to hear the enthusiasm in Haiti for the possibility we are exploring of a technician training program in the country. Jean Polycarpe from our team worked his magic in over-hauling a non-functioning anesthesia machine, and was able to train the HUEH techs in repair techniques in their native languages of French and Haitian Creole. Lora and I worked with two of the technicians to repair an x-ray viewer and a microscope where a short circuit had occurred at one of the connectors inside the case. Lora helped with the French translation, and I hope they were able to pick something up about electronics trouble-shooting from my non-verbal communication and our limited English/French dialogue (the French being very limited on my part). We were also able to supply the technicians with some new ESU testers, constructed by our volunteers via the EWH Kits program. We trained them how to use these devices, and the tester allowed them to calibrate an ESU generator for the first time and place it into service. In total, we put four pieces of equipment into service today and assessed upwards of thirty others for possible future steps, but the most rewarding part was working with the technicians who were eager to repair equipment and acquire new skills.

Adding to the challenges in Haiti is our lack of an internet connection this evening at the hotel. Word is that internet is out everywhere around town tonight, so if you are reading this, you know it was repaired. If it’s not repaired soon, I’ll look forward to a deluge of irritated/concerned emails when it is.

For more info about EWH, please visit www.ewh.org or email info@ewh.org.