Life in Haiti

DECATUR — Molly Stroud of Prairie Grove spoke to Northside Elementary School children on Thursday about her experience during the Jan 12 earthquake in Haiti.

Stroud, amother of four, was on a medical mission trip in Haiti with a group called Mission to Haiti when the earthquake occurred. She talked to students in grades two through five, giving age appropriate details to each group.

Stroud started herpresentation by explaining to students what Haiti was like before the earthquake. The country is very poor because all of the trees were cut down and sold for timber. Without any trees to anchor the soil, all the top-soil washed away and left the country a desert, she said.

Flying over the island of Hispaniola, the first thing Stroud noticed was that Haiti was brown like a desert while the Dominican Republic, on the other side of the island, was lush and green.

More than 75 percent of the people in Haiti don’t have jobs, Stroud told the children. There are lots of barber shops and lottery machines, and many people play the lottery in hopes of changing their fortunes, she said.

“It’s really sad because they already don’t have enough money and then they spend most of it on the lottery,” Stroud said.

There are no building codes in Haiti, so most houses are built by stacking four walls against each other, kind of like a house of cards, she said. Most homes have concrete roofs propped on top of the walls because there are no trees in the country for lumber. The houses are packed against each other up and down the hillsides. When the earthquake came, the homes fell down like dominoes and the concrete roofs crushed the people inside, Stroud said.

Most houses in Haiti are only one room. There is no indoor plumbing and they have no refrigerator because they only have a few hours of electricity aday, Stroud said.

People cook outdoors and bathe by carrying a bucket to the local well or water source. Bathrooms are also outdoor buckets, shared by the whole neighborhood.

“Imagine a bathroom for 100 people that hasnever been cleaned,” Stroud said.

People dispose of trash by throwing it down in the street. It washes into the gutters and fills empty river beds during the dry season. Stroud said she saw river beds piled with 20 feet of trash, withgoats and pigs roaming around eating the refuse.

Because of the harsh living conditions, people have a lot of health problems, she said. Many people have intestinal worms and get sick from the poor-quality food and water. Everyone goes barefoot and a simple cut on the foot can be deadly in unsanitary conditions and without antibiotic treatment, she said.

Stroud showed pictures of a little girl who had naturally black hair that had turned orange from malnutrition.

Stroud worked at a Mission to Haiti camp. The camp provided family practice medical care and dentistry. The mission also gave out food and vitamins, she said. Although Stroud isn’t a medical professional, she worked as an assistant.

Stroud was inside the medical bus when the earthquake struck. The bus had just returned to the mission camp and parked, but the people hadn’t gotten up yet, when the ground started shaking, she said.

At first the bus started shaking, then it began to bounce from one end to the other and finally it rocked from side to side.

“It was rocking so hard at one point, I thought it was going to tip over,” Stroud said.

Stroud got off the bus as soon as the earthquake began to subside, but the ground was still swaying from side to side and there was nowhere to escape the creepy feeling, she said.

Part of the wall around the mission camp fell and the air looked smoky from the dust. Many of the Haitian people outside were panicking, and Stroud and her companions walked over the walls and began scooping children up and carrying them to safety inside the camp.

“Our camp, within just a few minutes, turned into a hospital,” she said.

Because the camp was set-up to operate as a family practice clinic, it had some medical supplies but not a lot of first-aid items. After the staff ran out of bandages and gauze, they tore up bed sheets to cover wounds, Stroud said.

Doctors used headlights and flashlights to stitch wounds in the dark. They used boards and duct tape to splint broken bones. They saw patients from 5 p.m. until 5:30 a.m., before the staff ran out of supplies and there was nothing more they could do to help people.

“We treated people who needed limbs cut off but, of course, we couldn’t do that ... That was hard for me because I knew they wouldn’t get the care they needed,” she said.

The buildings inside the mission camp were built similar to those in the United States and withstood the shaking with some damage. The camp also had a generator, so Stroud was able to keep in touch with her husband over the Internet throughout the whole ordeal.

“The city was getting kind of crazy. A lot of people were panicking and they couldn’t find their family members ... Everywhere we went there were people climbing around trying to find people stuck in the rubble,” she said.

After their medical supplies ran out, the missionaries turned their attention to finding a way home.

“Lieutenant Scott Patterson of the United States Armed Services found us at 2 a.m. and escorted us to the Port-a-Prince airport,” Stroud said. A C17 airplane had delivered supplies to Haiti and had 56 seats available to take passengers back to the United States. All 46 members of Stroud’s group were able to hitch a ride on the airplane back to New Jersey.

Even though she is home, Stroud is still thinking about how much need there is in Haiti, especially after the earthquake. People have no where to go and nothing to eat, she said. It only costs $3,000 to build a house in Haiti, in comparison with more than a $100,000 in the United States, she said.

“I think if we all just do a little bit - whatever we can - we can all make a big difference,” she said.