Just minutes after landing at the airport in Port-Au-Prince and unloading their planeload of food and medical equipment, the IsraAid team traveled to the capital city’s collapsed main hospital to join the lone local physician treating the injured there.
As the first foreign backup team to arrive at the hospital, the IsraAid team set up treatment rooms in four empty rooms, treating 60 patients with IV and administering medicine.
Logistics personnel remained near the airport where they set up camp and provided logistical support to local NGOs who were receiving relief items.
In light of the scale of the disaster, IsraAID is planning to expand the scope of its operation, and is organizing an additional team to be sent out next week.
Nurse Sheva Cohen from Kibbutz Ein Yahav in the Negev reports that, “The scenes in the hospital were horrible we saw people everywhere on the floors in the building and outside, people with amputations and bone-deep wounds, hundreds of them, the size of the catastrophe is unbelievable.”
IsraAID’s emergency response in Haiti is supported through donations from UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, American Jewish Committee, Bna’i B’rith International and The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago as well as other Jewish Federations in the North America.