Despair hope come through in volunteers notes from Haiti

Dallas businessman Mike Roberts flew to Haiti on his company jet Monday with two doctors, a nurse and a load of medical supplies. His aim was to help in any way he could.
One of his first tasks was to comfort a dying boy.

“I have seen 3 people die in my first 5 hours. One was just a boy – he slowly died of respiratory failure. As he gasped for air he rarely took his eyes off me,” Roberts said in an e-mail message Tuesday evening.

He said he tried to get the boy airlifted to the Comfort, a Navy hospital ship floating off the coast near Port-au-Prince. But he wasn’t able to save the boy, who is among the estimated 200,000 who have died from injuries suffered in the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Days after the disaster, Roberts, president of computer services company Source Direct, offered the use of his plane to the Texas Baptist Mission Foundation. The foundation arranged for three medical workers to leave on the flight, and Baylor Health Care System and its employees donated medical supplies.

Roberts said his pilots secured four landing times at the Port-au-Prince airport over a week’s span. The pilots are using those time slots to shuttle people back and forth from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“The airport was unlike anything I have ever seen. Thousands of people waiting to get out,” Roberts said in his message. “As soon as we got off the plane we were approached by a group of young missionaries asking to catch a ride out. They had been asking every incoming flight for the last 3 days. I am not sure how they got inside the perimeter but I agreed to fly home 6 of them. …”

“We were taken to Haiti community hospital. There was a lot of people outside the gates begging for food. The hospital has security to keep the hospital from being overrun. We are sleeping on the roof because they say it is safer if the building were to collapse due to aftershocks or another quake. …”

“The doctor who greeted us had body bags under one arm as he showed us around – a harsh realization of just how bad it really is here.”

Back home in Dallas, Rachel Roberts said she has faith that her husband will be OK, but the text about the dying boy shook her. “It’s one thing to hear it on the news and another thing to hear it first-hand from your husband,” she said.

She said that before her husband purchased the company jet two years ago, they talked about using it to help others.

“We had always said that if we were ever blessed with that luxury for his company that we would want to use it for humanitarian purposes as well. When this earthquake hit, it took a day or two to register what had happened. On Saturday night after the earthquake, I said, ‘Why don’t you just send the jet down with some doctors?’ And he said he was thinking of the same thing.”

The next day, he approached a minister at their church, Park Cities Baptist, who put them in contact with the Texas Baptist Mission Foundation and the Faith in Action Initiatives for Baylor Health Care System.

Don Sewell, who heads up Faith in Action, has also made arrangements for Baylor doctors to get into Haiti on other flights. He has a growing list of 20 to 30 other medical workers who have volunteered to go.

One of the doctors, Jim Walton, has sent a series of e-mails, including:

Sunday: “There are not enough Operating Rooms working for all of the surgeons who are here trying to help … we are setting up a hospital out in the country.”

Monday: “We saw over 100 cases, performing 10 orthopedic surgeries, treated multiple cases of wound-related sepsis. … we are caring for people in this makeshift hospital that would typically be admitted to our hospitals in Dallas, and some would go to our intensive care units.”

Tuesday: He sent photos – posted at www.facebook.com/baylorhealth – of a boy who received a cast after his broken femur was set. “He will go home today to sleep on the ground too … amazing people.”

Wednesday: “I spent the day traveling to villages where the displaced are relocating out of Port-au-Prince. We didn’t see any untreated trauma patients. We did see lots of children living in extraordinary poverty …There are lots of prayers as we travel from house to house and tent to tent, because it is all we can think of doing as we do this level of work.”

News reports out of Haiti this week say that children are being released from hospitals with no one to care for them. Rachel Roberts said her husband, who has reached her by cellphone, told her that he has befriended a 3-year-old boy running loose in the hospital.

The couple, who have three children, want a fourth and plan to adopt. Rachel Roberts said she hopes the bureaucracy involved in adopting Haitian orphans won’t be too cumbersome to get children placed fairly quickly.

“If this would work out that we could adopt a Haitian child, that would be one of the greatest gifts,” she said.