60 Minutes is airing an incredibly moving piece on Haiti tonight. Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health (http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti), and doctors on the ground take a journalist through the unimaginable. People still trapped alive, bodies everywhere are being picked up by bulldozers and taken to mass graves to lessen massive public health risks, government buildings completely destroyed with thousands dead under the rubble, and infrastructure challenges preventing medical supplies from getting to the few doctors in place right now to help those in critical condition.
A doctor in just one small area among the destruction said that 100 people were in critical condition waiting for her to perform major orthopedic surgery. Imagine everything that someone in critical condition here in a hospital would be hooked up to and given to stabilize them and lessen the pain; there is none of this. There were no lights (they're using flashlights), no sterile equipment, they were finding saws and trying to sterilize them with the little bit of alcohol they could find. Medical equipment and teams have arrived at the airport, but there are major bottlenecks to get people and supplies from point A to point B. So they are improvising. What brave and courageous angels these doctors are. Hopefully the physical support of the U.S. military and other nations, as well as the outpouring of financial support from all over the globe, will help to break down these barriers in an efficient and expeditious way. We can hope.
The piece will likely be up in full on the website below. It is a very difficult watch, but raw and real. As Paul Farmer said in the piece, "the Haitians have a lot to teach the rest of us about climbing out of hell." They are a resilient people, and we continue to pray for them.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml?tag=hdr;cnav
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