BY MARTHA QUILLIN – Staff Writer

CABARET, Haiti — Dr. Bill Harden and his medical team have 130 miracles to perform in the next three hours, and yet his examination chair is empty.

“Bryan,” he snaps to a young volunteer helping the N.C. Baptist Men run this morning’s clinic. “I need a patient. Bring me a patient. Keep them coming. An empty seat, I can’t treat.”

Even as the aid group has begun switching its emphasis to shelter construction, the Baptists and dozens of other relief organizations continue to bring in medical teams because so few of Haiti’s people have access to care.

The free clinics they run daily in small schools, churches and under tarps in tent cities are both a blessing and a bane. Hospitals – many struggling financially before the earthquake and severely damaged afterward – have begun to close, in part because patients find their way to the free clinics instead. Other hospitals have cut staff and reduced hours.

After treating more than 12,000 patients and performing 3,000 surgeries for free after the earthquake, one of Haiti’s most modern hospitals, Sacred Heart/CDTI, closed on March 31. The founder of the hospital, a year ago the site of Haiti’s first organ transplant, said he could no longer pay his employees.

“There is huge need for medical care – good medical care – in this country,” said Sheryl Brumley, a nurse from Greeley, Colo., who runs a free burn clinic in Titanyen for Global Outreach, another U.S.-based Christian organization. “The big question is how to pay for it.”

The N.C. Baptist Men believe they are treating people who would not be able to afford health care otherwise. They target extremely poor areas where they know that’s who will come.

Francoise Robina, 22, came to the clinic Friday with a fever and stomach ache. She has worms, she said.

“If we haven’t this clinic here, I would go somewhere else I would have to pay for,” she said through an interpreter. “I can’t pay for it.”

Volunteers for the N.C. Baptist Men pay their own way to Haiti, $1,100 each, to work for a week at a time. Medical teams often come with suitcases full of over-the-counter drugs – aspirin and cough syrup that Americans pick up at Wal-Mart but which are out of reach of most Haitians. The volunteers bring bandages and crutches, antacids and asthma medications.

Harden’s most powerful medicine is a pink pill that comes in a red-and-blue wrapper.

“Bubble gum,” he tells his young patients, who are sick and scared.

Donated, out of date

Next up at Friday morning’s clinic, held in a one-room school in the town of Cabaret, north of Port-au-Prince, is a 40-year-old grandmother and two children. The kids have intestinal problems; the woman, a host of complaints including high blood pressure and, Harden suspects, diabetes.

But his team has run out of blood-sugar test strips. They also didn’t get here with anti-inflammatory pills that Harden spent an hour counting into zip-top bags the night before, and there is no liquid Tylenol for children.

Their waiting room is a pair of benches under a shade tree. Examinations are done on rickety chairs in a building with a truck-sized hole in one wall. The pharmacy consists of donated, often out-of-date drugs they carry around in plastic crates.

And this is the best medical care some of these patients have ever had.

Harden’s is the 20th medical team the N.C. Baptist Men Disaster Relief has sent to Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake. At first, the volunteer doctors, nurses and pharmacists were treating the traumatic injuries caused by falling debris: crushed arms, broken legs, head wounds.

Now they are seeing maladies people have had for months or years that have been treated sporadically, or with voodoo, or not at all. Diabetes is common, as is hypertension. There is a lot of what sounds like arthritis, many gastrointestinal diseases from contaminated water and food, and nearly every woman who comes in seems to have a vaginal infection.

Teams also see typhoid and malaria, and have had at least one case of leprosy.

‘Bonjour, bonjour’

Harden, who practices internal medicine in Rocky Mount, loves medical mission work, which he has done in Zambia, Uganda and elsewhere. He runs his clinics efficiently. As patients come in, team nurses take their blood pressure and other information, writing notes on index cards the clients carry with them. These are their medical records.

When they get to Harden’s chair, he greets them and shakes their hands.

“Bonjour, bonjour,” he says, and then asks, through an interpreter, “What’s your problem today?”

He makes notes on their cards, consults with Jane Burian, a pharmacist who works in Research Triangle Park, who tells him what they have and what they don’t. He explains, through the interpreter, what the patient needs to do.

Compared to food and water distributions, which can spawn riots, medical clinics are relatively orderly affairs.

At another of the Baptists’ clinics this week, patients took numbers and sat quietly on the benches of the Eglise Baptiste Libre in the small community of Bon Repos, just outside Port-au-Prince. A wall of the church that fell in the earthquake had been recently repaired.

Half of the roof also came down and had not yet been fixed, so the morning sun came through a blue tarp. A skinny dog slept in the dirt.

The pastor, Gaston Milord, used to live in an open-air room on the roof. Since the quake, he lives in a tent just outside the door.

“The clinic is good for the people in the community,” he said, struggling to find the words in English.

Rebecca Buck, a retired registered nurse from Belhaven, saw one patient after another, mostly young women and children. She had a 25-year-old with knee pain, a child with a cough and runny nose.

Misery, poverty, heroes

Scott Daughtry, who organizes the work teams for the Baptist Men, said the clinics are doing a valuable service.

“There is more misery, more poverty and more heroes in this place than anywhere I’ve ever been,” said Daughtry, who has done mission work all over the world.

“Life goes on after the earthquake, and in Haiti, life is hard,” he said. “We can’t do anything about the dead. But we can help the sick and the poor.”

The Miami Herald contributed to this report.
martha.quillin@newsobserver.com or 919-829-8989

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