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Medical Missionaries aim to help quake victims
On Tuesday night, Manassas doctor Gilbert Irwin was trying to find out whether his medical clinic in Haiti was still standing.“I've been watching CNN myself,” he said, adding that he had not been able to get in touch with anyone at the clinic in Thomassique, Haiti.
Irwin's nonprofit, Medical Missionaries, has operated the Clinique de St. Joseph in Thomassique for three years. The clinic, which is essentially a hospital, is the first in a desperately poor region of 125,000.
As of press time, Irwin was trying to find out if it still exists after Tuesday's 7.0 earthquake devastated the capital of Port au Prince.
The doctor, who was the Gainesville Times' 2007 Citizen of the Year, said he had seen a CNN reporter broadcasting from the nearby town of Hinche, which had experienced tremors.
The reporter said that the buildings in Hinche were “holding their own at that point in time,” Irwin said, adding that the report gave him hope that his clinic had survived.
Regardless, he said, “a lot of people will move out of the devastated areas” and will head to the small villages like Thomassique.
“We're already trying to estimate what we're going to have to do,” he said, speculating that the clinic will probably see an influx of refugees from Port au Prince and other devastated areas.
More medical supplies and food will definitely need to be sent, he said, and transportation will be difficult because the roads have likely been destroyed.
The staff at the Medical Missionaries clinic treats some of the world's poorest citizens suffering from horrific injuries and devastating diseases.
Machete wounds and infections are common in an area where men work barefoot in sugar cane fields, he said.
Other patients aren't cured but are given help living. One 4- or 5-year-old boy had spent his entire life crawling because he had no crutches or braces to support his disease-riddled legs. Irwin and his staff acquired a pediatric walker, allowing him to stand for the first time.
Another patient was a bilateral amputee whose insurance company was about to take away his bed. The Medical Missionaries brought him a new hospital bed, carrying it in pieces up three flights of stairs to the floor where he lived with his family.
The Haitians hit by the earthquake will have lost everything, Irwin said Tuesday, and that's especially tragic because most have “close to nothing to begin with.”
A Medical Missionaries team had been planning to head to Haiti on Jan. 30. Now, an emergency team may go down sooner, Irwin said.
“It's a mess. It's a big mess and it's a shame because these people have so little to begin with,” he said.
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