Ordinary people must end Haiti's extraordinary hell

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

This isn't what you want to read on a Sunday morning, or on any morning. It's yet another horror story about suffering people thousands of miles away. We don't want to know about any more suffering people. We've got enough problems: not enough money to make ends meet; not enough jobs to go around.

Cities exploding. Hope imploding. Locked doors in the house, even when you're home. Locked doors in the car, even when you drive. No stopping to help anyone; no looking around. People weird, ready to attack. Trouble in the schools; trouble in the streets; homes aren't havens; church doors are locked; Cancer, AIDS, hurricanes. We don't need more problems!

And yet we have NO problems compared to the people of Haiti.

"Disobey the rules; ask for more; leave your wretchedness behind; organize with your brothers and sisters, never accept the hand of fate," Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide told his people before they elected him president. They risked their lives to vote for him, waited hours in line, because he promised them hope. But their hope was savaged when less than eight months after his election, Aristide's enemies deposed him.

For nearly a year now the political world has done nothing to restore constitutional rule in Haiti. The Organization of American States has the authority to intervene but it mouths platitudes and twiddles its thumbs, for Haiti has neither votes nor oil, just poor people dying every day.

And poor, powerless people don't count.

Ordinary people have to save Haiti. Ferdinand G. Mahfood, founder of FOOD FOR THE POOR, which feeds the hungry all over the world, is begging ordinary people to help. "I didn't know a country could die, but I think Haiti is dying," he writes. "One of the staff members of FOOD FOR THE POOR has just returned from a trip to Haiti where she spent a week visiting hospitals, childrens' homes, sanitoriums and other facilities. Josephine found the people and the country in a desperate situation; far worse than when she was there in 1989.

"On Monday morning she toured the Obstetrical and Gynecological Hospital in Port Au Prince. Josephine said `it was like looking into the depths of hell.' She saw a woman already in labor sitting on the cement floor with her head in the lap of another woman who was trying to comfort her. There was no bed for this woman. She saw a very dark room with about 15 examining tables down each wall. This was the `delivery room' and the women on the tables were all in their street dress as there are no hospital gowns.

"There are no antiseptics. Caesarean sections are performed without anesthesia. Women die after childbirth because the episiotomy becomes infected and there are no antibiotics.

"In the `maternity ward' she saw about 24 women who had just been delivered. Two women and their newly born infants shared the same bed. There are no cribs for the infants.

"The hospital, which had over 150 beds had only 60 as a result of a fire in 1991, which destroyed over 70 percent of the building. Doctors and staff have not received a salary for a year.

"Whatever bed linens there are are washed by hand and hung out to dry. The hospital needs beds, cribs, mattresses and linens. They need commercial washers and dryers. They need gowns for patients, gowns for doctors and nurses, medications, pails, basins, towels, sanitary pads, speculums, stethoscopes, sphygmomanometers, an autoclave, antibiotics, antiseptics, receiving blankets and infant-size Pampers. The needs of nine million destitute people are overwhelming."

But not unsolvable.

"Even if I cannot cure them, I can be for them comfort and strength," said St. Damien.

"As often as you did it for one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me," said Christ.