The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 120, No. 3, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 21, 2010 Page: 4 of 32
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THURSDAY 2 1 JANUARY ZD! □
NEWS PAGE
THE CANADIAN RECORD
On the ground in Haiti:
Wes Wallace returns to childhood home to aid in earthquake response and rescue
"He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim
freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the
prisoners... to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those
who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and
a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair." ISAIAH
61:1-3
Haiti's capital city lay in ruins this week after a powerful
7.0-magnitude earthquake toppled buildings—including the
presidential palace'—leveled hospitals and orphanages and
destroyed homes in and around Port-au-Prince, leaving untold
numbers of this already destitute country's inhabitants buried
beneath the rabble.
Today, an estimated 1.5 million people are displaced.
The number of dead and injured is still not known as re-
covery efforts continue, but it is estimated that as many
as 200,000 may have perished. Relief efforts have been
slowed by the near-total destruction of power and phone
service which hampered communication, and by severe
damage to Port-au-Prince's medicalfacilities.
Within hours of initial reports on the massive
quake—which struck just before 5 p.m. last Tuesday—
Canadian's Wesley Wallace was on his way back to Haiti,
his childhood home where his knowledge and love of the
country and its people, his fluency in the native language,
and his skills in construction would all prove essential to
the rescue efforts already underway.
Wesley heard the devastating news from his parents,
who called after hearing the first reports on television.
Brian Wallace and his wife Tammie have long been in-
volved in mission work in Haiti and the Dominican Re-
public, and before that in Botswana, where Wesley lived
as a young child. They moved to Haiti when Wesley was
ten, and continued working there for the next six years
until growing violence and political instability posed too
great a danger, forcing them to relocate across the bor-
der in the Dominican Republic.
"Have you seen the news?" Brian asked when Wes
picked up the phone last Tuesday.
"We hadn't toned it onyet,"said Wes' wife Ashleigh, whose
father, Dean English, is involved in his own ministry here with
the Church of Christ.
After hanging up the phone, they started turned on the t.v.
Wes' response to the horrifying reports was immediate, Ash-
leigh said. "I wish there was something I could do to help."
He called his father and said, "I'm here if you need me."
"I didn't want to ask," his father told him, adding, "I was hop-
ing you'd call me back."
On Wednesday morning, Wallace boarded an airplane in
Amarillo bound for Miami, Florida, where he met with a group
of nurses, doctox-s and missionaries headed for the Dominican
Republic. They are part of an initial assessment team dis-
patched by Manna Global Ministries, a mission already active
in the Dominican Republic with well-established outreach ef-
forts in Haiti.
As horrifying as the television news reports of Haiti's cri-
sis have been to watch, the experience on the ground is much
worse.
The team arrived in Port-au-Prince last Thursday evening,
carried across the border by helicopter. Since their arrival, they
have worked day and night, with only 2-3 hours of sleep taken
each day inshifts. They have setup a triage to deal with medical
care and rescue, and are working feverishly to establish supply
lines for transport of much-needed food, water, fuel and medi-
cines.
The team's first priority was getting to an orphanage in
Port-au-Prince supported by Manna. Of the orphanage's seven-
teen residents, one had died. The rest were safe.
After assessing the children's situation and assuring their
safety, the team ventured out into the city. They met a surgeon
who told them the hospital desperately needed help. At the hos-
pital, there were hundreds of badly injured waiting for atten-
tion, with very few medical personnel available to provide it.
"It was bad," Ashleigh reads from an e-mail written by one
team member. "There are no words to explain what I was see-
ing. I had to tell a 13-year-old today that she was going to lose
one of her eyes.
"The Lord is using me and everyone in our group to tend to
the Haitians. Even though all of our team is well-trained, the
situationis overwhelming. Please pi-ay that we can deal with the
1
A_
pain in our own hearts as we help others."
Phone calls home from Haiti tend to begin with the words: "I
can only talk a minute." In one brief phone call, Wesley told his
wife, "It's bad and it's getting worse."
At first, he said, the task of tending to so many who had been
hurt was daunting. But as days have passed, and sepsis and in-
fection begin to set in, those who could not be cared for before
require much more radical treatment
"They ask you to stitch them up or bandage them," Wesley
explained, "and you have to help them understand it's beyond
that point. We are dealing with amputations and surgeries. It is
getting increasingly harder,"
Though fluent in Creole—the native dialect which blends
Spanish and Freneh—even a facility with language has not pre-
pared Wesley for the task he now performs on a daily basis. "It's
difficult telling someone that they're going to have to amputate
an arm or a leg, and they're just begging them to fix it," Wesley
told his father-in-law this week.
"That's one of the hardest things he's had to do," English
said. "It's gone from injury to amputation to x-emoval of the
dead...and there's no end to it. It just seems to be getting worse
instead of better."
In an online posting from the Manna website, one doctor
with the team said the long-term needs of the people of Port-
au-Prince will be enormous. Because many have not received
treatment or have received inadequate treatment, and because
the water supply is of sueh poor quality, the medical community
will face a second round of critical clinical needs.
"Infections, fevers and various diseases will set in quickly,"
the post said. "The health care issues will be massive and long-
tejm"
At the end of this week, Wesley will return to Canadian,
where he and Ashleigh live and are raising their two children—
four-year-old Kaiya (Afriean for "home") and one-year-old
Liam—and whei'e Wesley is employed by the City of Canadian.
(See photo below) Whether he will be ealled back to help with
the lengthy rebuilding pi-ocess in Haiti is not known. That he
will need time to recover from the painful process of tending to
the broken and dying is almost certain.
It is also certain that the people of Haiti will depend on the
rest of the world's generosity to help them rebuild from the mas-
sive damage that took only seconds to create. There ax-e many
ways to help. These are only a few:
•Manna Global Ministries, www.manna-
globalministries.org. Click on the "Donate" link at the
left of the page, or mail contributions to P.O. Box 2993,
Clarksville, IN 47131. Manna also offers opportuni-
ties for short- and long-term mission trips or to spon-
sor one of the orphanage's children, many of whom
are there in need of temporary care due to separation
of parents, or difficult financial times in their homes
(click on the "Ways to Help" link). For more day-to-
day reports about Manna's work in Haiti, go to www.
theheartofmanna. blogspot.com.
•Partners in Health and its partner organiza-
tion Zanmi Lasante have worked in Haiti for nearly
twenty-five years, and today is one of the largest non-
governmental health care providers in the country.
PIH works to bring modem medical care to poor com-
munities in nine countries around the world. The work
of PIH has three goals: to care for their patients, to
alleviate the root causes of disease in their communi-
ties, and to share lessons learned around the world.
Based in Boston, PIH employs more than 11,000
people worldwide, including doctors, nurses and com-
munity health workers. The vast majority of PIH staff
are local nationals based in the communities it serves.
To learn more about their work in Haiti, or to make a donation,
go online to www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti. If you would prefer
to donate by mail, send a check to: Partners In Health, P.O.
Box 845578, Boston, MA 02284-5578.
•Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
(MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization
working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose sur-
vival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. MSF
operates independently of any political, militaiy, or religious
agendas. MSF has been working in Haiti for 19 years, most re-
cently operating three emergency hospitals in Port-au-Prince,
and is mobilizing a large emergency response to this disaster.
The organization's immediate response in the first hours fol-
lowing the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private
unrestricted donations from around the world received before
the earthquake struck. MSF is currently reinforcing its teams
on the ground in order to respond to the immediate medical
needs and to assess the humanitarian needs that MSF will be
addressing in the months ahead. To learn more about theirwork
in Haiti or to make a donation, go online to www.doctorswith-
outborders.org/
EDITOR'S Nl W-.Another strong quake hit Haiti early yesterday
morning, shaking buildings and sending people running into
the streets. The U.S. Geological Sun>ey says thepreliminary 6.0
magnitude quake hit Wednesday around 6:05 a.m. about 35
miles northwest of the capital
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Brown, Laurie Ezzell. The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 120, No. 3, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 21, 2010, newspaper, January 21, 2010; Canadian, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth220823/m1/4/: accessed June 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Hemphill County Library.