Harvard Lends Helping Hands to a Shaken Country

Larry D. Arbuthnott ’10 was woken from his afternoon nap by his grandmother's worried shrill: “Turn on the news! I think there's been an earthquake in Haiti.”

As he came to his senses on that cold Tuesday evening in his New Jersey home, Arbuthnott begrudgingly tuned in to CNN. Moments later, he snapped into rapt attention.

“'This isn’t real,'" Arbuthnott recalls thinking. "'I was just in the country. Haiti? What do you mean Haiti?'”

But the situation, despite its seeming trappings of sheer impossibility, was starkly real on the television screen before him. The capital of his mother's native country—a place that Arbuthnott had recently visited for the first time over New Year's for a little over a week—had suffered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

A mere week had passed since Arbuthnott's return to the United States.

The cataclysmic earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12 unleashed devastation in a country that was already among the poorest in the hemisphere. It came without warning, Arbuthnott said.

"No one thinks of earthquakes in the Caribbean. It's not like it was a hurricane—it's not hurricane season. It was like someone told me a volcano erupted in the middle of the island," said Arbuthnott, whose mother, on a bus from New York, had not yet heard the news at the time of his television screening.

But word has spread fast—landing on the front page of major newspapers, traveling into the confines of Harvard Yard, and even prompting University President Drew G. Faust to send a statement on Thursday asking the community to contribute to relief efforts on behalf of a shaken nation. And the Harvard community has done just that.

HANDS THAT HELP

Not long after the earthquake subsided, some members of the Harvard community raced to the home of destruction to provide the aid that Haiti desperately needed.

Two faculty members from the Medical School traveled to Haiti on Wednesday, joining the staff of Partners In Health—a non-profit Harvard affiliate—in providing aid to the residents of the mountainous Central Plateau through its non-governmental health clinics.

“We are well-established in Haiti,” said Andrew R. Marx, director of communications at PIH . “We have a network of hospitals to provide emergency assistance."

The relief efforts of PIH can be described as a two-pronged goal, Marx said. First, the organization seeks to strengthen the health care system in Haiti to facilitate the clinics' ability to attend to the influx of people expected by the rescue team. The organization is bringing in extra surgeons to staff the clinic and more supplies to stock the warehouse, according to Marx.

PIH's second approach, he said, is the establishment of facilities in Port-au-Prince to bolster emergency treatment and to identify the patients who require more advanced surgery and must be transported to the Plateau. On Thursday night, PIH posted a lengthy list of immediate needs on its Web site, citing concerns related to transportation and supplies.

Marx said that PIH has about 4,000 people working in Haiti, including 100 doctors and 600 nurses. But the figures seem hopelessly slim when situated beside the several million in need and the tens of thousands now dead.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

To facilitate the communication and coordination end of PIH's operation, along with the operation of other Harvard-affiliated health institutions, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative—a University-wide academic and research center for response to humanitarian crises—is working with its partners at Harvard, PIH, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital by providing information to them after assessing Haiti's needs.

“We are taking part in a coordinated response effort," said Vincenzo Bollettino, director of programs and administration at HHI.

HHI is also creating a roster of medical and public health volunteers that includes both people currently working on the relief effort and individuals who have volunteered to help, according to Bollettino. These certified medical, surgical, and public health personnel are available for deployment to Haiti when the need arises.

But the most immediate need in Haiti, according to both Marx and Bollettino, is money—the quickest route to supplying the needs of Haitians.

"There is no clean water, which is a major public health hazard,” Marx said. “It’s been cold. They don’t have blankets.”

Though Haiti currently possesses a decent stock of medical supplies and the PIH clinics have an adequately stocked warehouse, resources eventually become insufficient, according to Marx.

COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS

Shellonda M. Anderson ’11, president of the Harvard Caribbean Club, has been working with the heads of other organizations on campus to coordinate relief efforts on campus.

Members of the HCC—along with the Harvard African Students Association, the Harvard Haitian Alliance, the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, the Harvard South Asian Men’s Collective, the Harvard Undergraduate Council, as well as many more student and community organizations—have their minds set on a tangible response.

Amongst the projects the HCC is trying to coordinate are a supply drive and a benefit concert, according to Anderson.

“I think it’s a question of what is needed right now,” said R. Vanessa Alix ’10, an HAA member who has relatives in Haiti. “People in Boston understand that there is no food, no water. If they can’t donate $10,000, then donating 10 cases of water is a tangible alternative."

"For those who can't give, some people are giving their prayers," Alix added.

Anderson said that the organizations are also working together to ensure that Harvard students, and even those beyond its gates, do not forget the disaster in Haiti after the next few weeks.

"The Harvard Haitian Alliance is a really small organization," Anderson said. "It's often overlooked. [The earthquake's] a tragedy, but at the same time it's an opportunity for the school to see how much of an impact it's had on the entire world."

CONTINUING HOPE

Watching CNN on that cold night was frustrating, Arbuthnott said, because there were no visuals, no pictures to help him envision the destruction in discussion on television. He recalled the shanty cement homes built on hillsides—and he feared the worst.

“The hardest part in this entire thing is not knowing, because you don't know what is going on,” said Alix, whose parents own orphanages and schools in Haiti. “There are so many people I know who have lost someone, or they know people who have lost someone. There are people who are dying who need to be helped.”

“I hope it awakens Americans and the world to a fixable problem,” Arbuthnott said. “The people there are very strong-willed, but you can’t just provide aid and walk away.”

Arbuthnott said that before arriving in Haiti on Dec. 27, 2009, his family had told him about the hope expressed by the natives, despite their poverty, even before the earthquake struck.

“There was a sense of optimism," Arbuthnott said. "I felt it when I was there."

—Staff writer Xi Yu can be reached at xyu@college.harvard.edu.