By Rachel Brown

At first, Rodovaldo Rodriguez was “heartbroken” when he arrived in Haiti last week and saw the deep poverty and earthquake ravaged landscape.

Days later, that feeling of sadness became mixed with frustration — frustration at having the money, expertise and willingness to help the needy but not the resources or organization to place them where they were needed. Rodriguez, a physician at the North Georgia Surgery and Comprehensive Breast Center, was one of three local medical practitioners who left for Haiti on Jan. 29 to volunteer their services. The group joined 12 other medical professionals for the trip sponsored through Atlanta-based charity Project Haiti Heart. They returned Thursday.

For five days, Rodriguez; Pablo Perez, an internal medicine doctor at St. Joseph’s Clinic; and Tracy Hooper, a nurse practitioner at The Health Depot in Chatsworth, worked nearly nonstop at General Hospital HUEH in Port-au-Prince and at Hatian Christian Mission in another area of the country.

While foreign aid and private financial contributions to the country is in the hundreds of millions, “It didn’t seem like any of it was at HUEH,” Rodriguez said.

There, patients were sharing oxygen tubing, volunteer medical workers had to beg for bottled water, and the only narcotics available to the hundreds recovering from wounds and amputations were the small supplies of morphine volunteers had brought with them.

The group flew into Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, caught a partial night’s rest, then departed at 3 a.m. for a road trip to Fond Parisien, Haiti. The roads are bumpy, but passable. It takes six hours to reach Haiti Christian Mission, the clinic where they would stay and tend to patients for the next week.

Most patients at the mission were not earthquake victims. They needed treatment for tuberculosis, diarrheal complications, malnutrition, syphilis, pneumonia. In the United States, the conditions would be treatable. In Haiti, they’re life-threatening.

One woman suffered from a giant, cancerous tumor eating through her breast and into her armpit. She needed surgery, but the only operating facilities available are being used for earthquake victims with traumatic wounds. So she went untreated.

Neither was there anything to be done to bring back the more than 150,000 dead lost in the Jan. 12 quake of a 7.0 magnitude and several strong aftershocks. Patients told their stories matter-of-factly. They lost a child, a spouse, an entire family, a close friend.

“What struck me the most about the people was how stoic they were in the face of such suffering and pain, how little they complained,” Rodriguez said. “They would tell you this with relatively little emotion.”

There was no hierarchy among the volunteer workers, Hooper said. No one bickered or minded tasks some might consider beneath them.

On Jan. 31, the team spent part of the day touring Port-au-Prince, witnessing the destruction for themselves. They donated food to an established church that had a system for distributing it.

At 4:46 p.m., the group waited inside the walled compound that is HUEH, Haiti’s large general hospital, which only partially survived the earthquake. At least 150 bodies of dead students and faculty still lie underneath mounds of concrete rubble that used to be a nursing school.

“You could smell the rotting corpses,” Rodriguez said. “Even when we were back in Fond Parisien, I would almost smell it — like you just can’t get it out of your brain.”

A volunteer from another group vomited at the smell.

Rodriguez was assigned along with another doctor to care for about 50 patients in a set of four of the many tent wards at the hospital. Perez and Hooper worked together in the ICU. All the medical supplies available to them were piled haphazardly on a table inside the wards. Running water was non-existent. Doctors “washed” with hand sanitizer. Flies were everywhere.

Instead of the usual detailed charting system outside each patient’s room, there were a few sheets taped to each cot. Various doctors hand-wrote notes about treatment, times to administer medicines, etc. Deciphering the scribble was tedious and time-consuming. Help and supplies were scarce.

In Rodriguez’s ward, a patient came in with acute abdominal pain. With no anesthesia, access to X-ray machines or means of conducting the usual tests, doctors were unable to determine the cause of his pain.

“He just died,” Rodriguez said.

In Perez’s unit, he swabbed down the tubing for the only oxygen machine available and swapped it between patients.

“It creates a lot of infectious control issues ... but we didn’t have a choice,” Perez said.

A patient recovering from abdominal surgery in Hooper’s ward at one point appeared ready to die but was better by morning. Hooper gave the patient’s sister the good news before she left. The woman pointed upward, pressed both hands together and made the sign of the cross.

Hooper’s ICU area was already understaffed, but so was the unit for the American volunteer nurse who came to her tent asking for supplies. One of his 60 geriatric patients had developed bed sores from having to lie so long in her own urine and feces. Hooper left ICU temporarily and helped him tend to her. The man prayed aloud that God would forgive him. He had done all he could.

The volunteers left Haiti on Tuesday through Santo Domingo to be replaced by another rotation of volunteers. Rodriguez said he doesn’t have a solution to all the problems surrounding the lack of supplies and help, but he believes volunteer organizations would have no trouble driving a large truck to HUEH to deliver some basic supplies. There is also a dire need for more medical volunteers, he said, especially on the night shift.

For Hooper, the trip has given her a renewed perspective on how unselfish people can be.

“You felt so appreciated,” she said. “You felt you had done something to make a difference.”

The doctors plan to return this summer but have not set a date.