Mission to Haiti: MHC’s Haeinn Woo ’11
February 2, 2010
Haeinn Woo ’11 (below in green) set out for the Dominican Republic over January Term for a two-week internship working to improve the health of impoverished women and children. The premed student from Port Washington, New York, had recently read Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in rural Haiti, and she aspired to visit his hospital there after her internship ended. Little did she know she’d end up at the epicenter of one of the world’s most calamitous earthquakes.
On January 12, Woo was at a community health center in the Dominican Republic when she felt an ominous shaking. Having spent the previous semester studying in Costa Rica, where minor earthquakes are frequent, she knew immediately what was happening. Moments later, news arrived from neighboring Haiti that a severe earthquake had devastated Port-au-Prince. “I thought to myself: I’m going to Haiti. That’s where they need help.”
After contacting the local Civil Defense office to volunteer her services, she began collecting food and medical supplies. Red tape delayed her plans repeatedly, but she persevered. A week later, she made her way to Santo Domingo, where she happened to meet up with a group of volunteers from all over the world bound for Haiti. She boarded a bus with them, and on the daylong journey they organized a team, including a paramedic from Boston, a Dominican orthopedic surgeon, a Canadian who had been vacationing in Puerto Rico, and a Haitian emigre named John, who served as the group’s translator.
When Woo’s team arrived at the airport in Port-au-Prince, they found total chaos. “There was no one to direct us. I was frustrated,” Woo said. “I had only 48 hours in Port-au-Prince and I wanted to do something.” She left the team and jumped on a truck with eight doctors from El Salvador headed to a refugee camp where, with her medical supplies, they set up a temporary clinic treating wounds and administering medicine. Before they left, she handed out the food she’d packed. “I was glad I decided to do the food distribution last. There was a near riot as I put food into the hands reaching out to me.” On the trip back to the airport, the doctors thanked her for her help and supplies. “They told me I was a miracle.”
Later in the day she accompanied John to his hometown, Pétionville. “As we arrived he pointed to a pile of rubble and said, ‘That was a supermarket,’ ” Woo said. “We climbed a steep hillside and found his house, a concrete slab held by a pillar that had not collapsed. His family was unhurt. It was an incredibly touching moment as he hugged them all. He spent 15 minutes with them, and then it was back to work.”
At the airport that night, Woo and her team set up their own tent city with other volunteers, including a couple of fitness instructors from New Jersey. “If you spoke the same language, you were best friends,” she said. The group took turns cradling a two-year-old orphan one of the fitness instructors had found left for dead in a pile of bodies.
Early the next morning, Woo’s group went to a refugee camp of 20,000 people near the airport. “Our mission was to find people in need of critical care and bring them to the tent clinic at the airport,” she said. “We found a little boy with his head split down to his bare skull, and a woman whose foot was turning gangrenous.”
Back at the clinic, several Greek doctors had set up a table in the road where mothers were bringing their babies for medical help. “I told one woman who had just delivered a baby by Caesarian section that she needed to breast-feed her baby. She said, ‘But I have no milk.’ So I gave her my nutrition bars. I realized their medical problems were mainly due to lack of food and water. I couldn’t understand how it could be so difficult to distribute the supplies that we saw piled up at the airport.”
Reflecting on her 48 hours in Haiti, Woo said, “I knew I couldn’t do much, I was only one person. But still, to those people who received the medicine and food I brought, it was better than nothing.”
Woo is grateful to Mount Holyoke’s Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, which funded her J-Term trip, and the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, which gave her a grant to do medical work in Ghana last summer. Above all, Woo thanks the College itself. “Mount Holyoke is the best place to prepare myself to become a doctor where they are needed most.”
Related Links:
Mission to Haiti Photos by Haeinn Woo
Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts
McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives
Five College Program in Culture, Health, and Science
Permanent link to this story: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/stories/5681949
