The earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12 gave Milwaukee nurse practitioner Gigi Pomerantz “48 hours of sleepless nights.”
Pomerantz is founder and president of Youthaiti, an organization that supports Haitian youth doing ecological development work (see June 26, 2008 Chronicle). She has worked with people living in the island nation’s rural areas.
“I was very worried about my kind of adopted family, my friends, children I’ve been watching over,” Pomerantz said in a telephone interview last month. She spent her non-working time “watching the news, looking to see faces” of people she knew.
Fortunately, because she had been working in the rural areas, most of her friends were not directly affected. Most of the injuries and fatalities happened in the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
However, the families of some of her friends were affected, and rural areas have been absorbing refugees from areas afflicted by the quake.
“There are a lot of people coming with only the shirt on their backs, some injured, in shock, dealing with post-traumatic stress issues,” Pomerantz said. Some people “have lost everything,” she said.
The news sent Pomerantz into action. She has since then been involved in “half a dozen or more” events to raise funds to aid Haitians afflicted by the quake.
And the success of these events appears to have surprised her. “The Milwaukee community has been amazing,” she said. “We’ve had a tremendous outpouring of support.”
On Feb. 13, Pomerantz left for Haiti, bringing money, medication, tents and clothing to distribute.
In addition, Pomerantz said that Youthaiti received a grant from the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief, a “big conglomeration of organizations” chaired by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
This grant will be used to start a pilot project in one of the camps for refugees from Port-au-Prince. This project will provide both sanitation facilities and gardens for growing food, Pomerantz said.
Pomerantz said she is planning on being in Haiti for two weeks, “but I don’t really know” how long she may end up staying there.
When she returns, she said she plans to do more fundraising and to speak “all over the place” about what she has seen in Haiti. In the summer, she hopes to go back to Haiti “with groups of people.”
Pomerantz isn’t the only Milwaukee-area Jewish person who went to Haiti to offer assistance.
On Feb. 18, David Moss, M.D., set off for the Caribbean island with 16 people — half medical professionals, half support staff — to work for eight days providing medical care in Port-au-Prince.
The group is a medical mission from an organization called Matthew 25, which Moss described as a Catholic group. Its name refers to a verse in the Christian Bible, Matthew 25:40: “Whenever you [helped provide food, medical care or comfort] for one of the least important [people], you did it for Me.”
Moss, an emergency medicine physician, said in a telephone interview on Feb. 15 that he had put his name on a list of physicians willing to go to Haiti, and the Matthew 25 group contacted him.
He said that not only did he feel no reluctance in participating with a Catholic group, but he was struck by how the Matthew verse “is pretty much a paraphrase” of Isaiah 58:6-8 in the Hebrew Bible, which also talks about how God desires that people “share your bread with the hungry and take the wretched poor into your home.”
This wasn’t the first time Moss had gone to Haiti. In fact, he first went with Pomerantz in May 2007, along with physical therapist Mimi Rozansky, her son Joel and his daughter Evan.
“It was a pretty profound experience,” he said. “To know Haitians is to love and be inspired by them. They’ve been dealt a poor hand in life, but by and large they are hard-working, friendly, kind, and they bear their lot with dignity and grace.”
“To those who have been blessed by the universe, and by that I mean almost every American as compared to Haitians, we are expected to give back,” Moss said.
“I’m going to make a difference with my medical skills,” he continued. “I think that if all I accomplish by showing up is to say to Haitians, ‘Look, you are not forgotten by the world, you are not alone, you matter…’ — if that’s all I accomplish, that’s sufficient.”
He also said that he would be happy to speak to any health care workers who might want to go to Haiti as well.
Milwaukeean Jeffrey Taxman, M.D., was in Haiti Jan. 19-29. But his mission was different.
Taxman is a psychiatrist who, as he put it in a telephone interview on Feb. 15, has developed “a subspecialty of disaster psychiatry.”
In that capacity, he has traveled the world and worked at such places as Ground Zero in New York City after Sept. 11, 2001; Sri Lanka after the tsunami; China after an earthquake; and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
And what he does at such places is primarily help the helpers — soldiers, police, firefighters, medical personnel — “people who have to keep doing their jobs as though nothing unusual is happening, even though they are in the middle of the same disaster and may have had their own loses,” he said.
Taxman was asked to go to Haiti by a physician who knew him and who was a member of a medical mission from Boston sponsored by a Catholic hospital chain, Caritas Christi Health Care.
He went with two surgeons, two emergency medicine physicians, an anesthesiologist, “a couple of nurses,” and a priest who also had training as a nurse, he said.
He spent about 60 percent of his time working with the members of his team, most of whom he said had never before been in a disaster.
He said that at the height of their work, the team members were performing 50 surgeries a day, many of them amputations that in well-equipped U.S. hospitals would not have been necessary, but were in Haiti’s conditions.
“While people are doing disaster work… they don’t realize how much energy they are expending and how little sleep they get,” Taxman said. Moreover, people often find it difficult to leave; “they felt they haven’t done enough, they almost feel guilty leaving.”
Taxman was also able to spend 40 percent of his time helping Haitians. He said he saw “maybe 100” people, including children who had had their entire families killed in the quake.
“It’s very fulfilling,” Taxman said of his work in Haiti. “I know that I helped a number of the staff, and I know there were many Haitians to whom I was able to offer some relief.”
In response to the invariable question of who helps him in a disaster situation, Taxman said, “I’m pretty much prepared. I know what I’m getting into.”
But he also said, “I get a lot of my own relief talking to the other staff members. Going over what each of us is going through really helps me.… Whether they know it or not, they often help keep me on an even keel, too.”
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