Edited excerpt for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett
The pain is staggering, crippling. Everyone who has watched the news or has friends or family in Haiti has touched the edges of this pain. Everyone who has seen the broken bodies and buildings, who has inhaled the dust and stench of dying in and around Port-au-Prince knows this even more intimately. Those lucky enough to live will carry some of this pain for the rest of our lives. I know my heart has never been broken like this.
I also feel my heart has broken open ─ enough to let me work, enough to stay upright and keep moving forward with the hope of helping my suffering sisters and brothers. When we could not help, which was very often, I still felt open to witness, to listen, to offer my presence and kindness.
It seems reasonable at this point to say that more than 200,000 have died and one-and-a-half to two million made homeless and displaced.… There is pressure on the infrastructure of the entire nation with so many fleeing the city to live in the countryside and in smaller cities. Much of Port-au-Prince and Jacmel needs rebuilding. Leogane is nearly completely destroyed.
We need to stay with Haiti for a long time. Our medicines and healthcare will play an important role but, in reality, a limited one. Durable health and fulfillment of other basic human rights grows best from social conditions and the basics: shelter, water, food, sanitation, families, education, a healthy environment and reforestation, art, music.
We need to remain open and optimistic.
The only other choice is nihilism, to be broken.…
‘We are alive.’
We can continue.
Sources and notes
Dr. Evan Lyon is a long time clinical volunteer with Partners in Health and more than a decade experience in rural Haiti. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He is currently on the faculty of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at BWH. Dr. Lyon’s work in Haiti has focused on community-based care for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition to his work with Partners in Health, he is an active member of the People’s Health Movement. http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/ers/faculty/narya/PtHphotosandbios.htm
Partners in Health's work in Haiti and worldwide, http://www.pih.org/.
“‘Breaking hearts open’ in Haiti” (by Evan Lyon), February 2, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/haitiearthquake/2010/02/20102272125725938.html
Dr Evan Lyon had just returned from Haiti where he spent two weeks working as a volunteer clinician with Partners In Health (PIH), a non-profit healthcare organization, at the University General Hospital (HUEH) in the capital Port-au-Prince.
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