Melanie Thomas put this show together. She has some tremendous photos that I just saw for the first time today. Mel was a wonderful member of the Medical Teams International team that was on the ground in the early response to the earthquake. She spent a bunch of time at King's Hospital sorting out the supplies and organizing the supplies that came in. She is one of the type of people that doesn't scramble to get in the limelight. She just gets busy doing the tasks at hand. Wow, did she work hard! She was such a blessing to the team! The show that she put together will move you and bless you. After watching it, please consider the questions that I've posted for you by clicking "read more" below.

Here are a couple of questions to get the discussion going:

Haiti continues to occupy a tremendous amount of my energy, both consciously  and subconsciously. In fact, I think that most everyone that was on our early team is still processing this disaster. I'm still having some dreams and wrestling with what I saw. I'm processing it on a couple of different levels. First of all I'm still very concerned about the long term health issues in Haiti. They have a long, long way to go. I am confident, however, that progress is being made. I'm encouraged by some of the plans that I've been told about and I don't feel that it is a hopeless situation. It is just going to be a long term struggle.

The other way that I'm processing the experience involves us. I can't help but ask myself, "What if it happened here?" That is good discussion for us to have. We need to be ready both from a physical, structural and procedural basis. We also need to be ready from a psychological basis. That is one thing that very few people talk about and I will address it in a new blog series entitled "How to Become Unshakable in Tough Times".

For now, let's take a look at what you can do from a physical, structural and procedural perspective. There is the check list of things that we can do to be ready from that standpoint. Here is a list that I lifted from the FEMA earthquake website:

I just came across this broadcast from AM Northwest featuring two of our team members, Journalist David Michael Smith and Physical Therapist Kathi McCoy:

Now the tears are starting to flow in Haiti.

Photo: Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

When I was there originally the entire country appeared to be numb. They had to be; they were in survival mode. Now, according to a fantastic article by the New York Times entitled "Haiti Emerges From Its Shock, and Tears Roll", the emotions are finally starting to surface. I would encourage you to read the article and ponder it. It is good for us to stop and think about these thing and what we value. I know that I certainly look at things differently after returning from Haiti. I'm no longer having such intense dreams but I'm thinking a lot about what's important.

These are some of the photos of my experience on the front lines of Haiti during the first couple of weeks after the earthquake. (Warning: some of these are graphic.)

Now that I've been back for a couple of days I thought I would share my heart with you. Perhaps you would like to know why I went.

It has occurred to me since my return from Haiti just over a week ago that there are two ways to look at major disasters. One can look at it from the perspective of Google Earth (the satellite view) or from the perspective of Facebook (relationships and networks with people) .

 

Since I've returned, a lot of folks have asked me how they can help. If you text the word "HOPE" to 25383 it will send $10 to the folks at Medical Teams International (you can do it more than once if you like). If you would like to donate a larger amount, please visit their site at www.medicalteams.org. Thank you to all of you that have supported the work in Haiti. My biggest fear is that we will move on and forget. There is such a tremendous need. I'm still having dreams every night.

During my senior year at Washington State University I did research on chickens at the Veterinary school. You know, it was just one of those things. In the process of it, I learned how to hypnotize (mesmorize) chickens. It really is something that everyone should know how to do. After all, you never know when it might come in handy. At WSU we did it so we could put them on their side and give them medication to relax them before we operated on them. So I just couldn't resist teaching my Haitian friends how to do. Besides, the team was eager to learn as well.

(Photo: Pastor Devariste's wife in route to Miami aboard a donated Learjet about 2 weeks ago.)

I was able to speak to Pastor Devariste in Miami and he told me that his wife is doing well. Not only is she going to live but it looks like she is going to be able to keep her vary own foot as well. Please keep her in your prayers. She is having surgery this Wednesday.

For nearly the past two weeks I've been working as hard as I know how to get King's Hospital up and running with two functioning ORs that could simultaneously do surgery on three patients. We met that goal about 48 hours after we started it. After reaching that goal,  we then began to focus our attention on the tent cities and other places where we might extend our work to reach more people. We began to partner with the Baptist Mission, Grace Tabernacle and Haiti One as we sought to understand the needs of the tent cities. Our plan was to use those places as outreach "clinics" to meet the needs of the patients there and, if needed, transfer patients via Haiti One's ambulance to King's Hospital for surgery or more advanced care. Today, Dr. Junie informed us that she wanted to return to business as usual at her hospital. In other words, now that her hospital was running again, she wanted to use her staff to manage the hospital and take care of the patients. This could turn out to be a great thing. It will free us up to meet more needs elsewhere. Therefore, today we did a 3D-Evaluation and decided that we should pack up and move from a hospital focus to a field focus. It only took us about 2 hours to gather our supplies and load the large cage truck.