Haitians who lost legs in quake get help to overcome a cultural stigma
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Jean Baptiste Franck, a Haitian man from Port-au-Prince who lost his right leg in the earthquake that devasted Haiti, walks through an exercise Tuesday with volunteer physical therapist John Hollinshead of Santa Maria, Calif., at the Hanger Clinic, which is operated in conjunction with the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Dechapelles, Haiti. PG slideshow: Haiti Hanger Clinic
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DESCHAPELLES, Haiti -- Pain comes with a soundtrack in this place, and Robinson Tondelier crammed his soul into a song he wrote for people marking the anniversary of the earthquake that robbed them of their legs.
"Gras a Dieu nou viven," he sang. "Thanks to God, we're alive."
He rubbed the head of one man and sang on in Kreyol: "Wait for them, don't leave them, they are people like you."
The guitar player, a guy named Amos Charite, played on. He had one leg. His wife left him after the earthquake. She took their two children. All he had left was a guitar and his hands. For now, they would have to do.
A generation of people has come to this mountain town three hours from Port-au-Prince in search of what the Haitians call "false feet." Without new limbs they are consigned to poverty, neglect and abandonment.
"Amputees are at the bottom of the social ladder," said Jay Tew, an ebullient little man who speaks Haitian Kreyol with a Louisiana accent. He runs the Hanger Clinic on the grounds of the Pittsburgh-based Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. Hanger, a major prosthetics firm with clinics around the country, sent Mr. Tew to Haiti after last year's earthquake. In a business that is doing harrowing business when they see 70 patients in a year, he has seen that many in a single day. In all, 700 people, mostly from Port-au-Prince, have come to this clinic to be fitted with the false feet they need to go on in a culture that does not forgive the wounded unless they heal.
Mitha Saint-Me lay on a sheet in the hospital yard seven days before a doctor saw her. Broken hospitals in Port-au-Prince were more morgue than medicine.
She was crushed between two falling walls and lost one leg right away. Doctors airlifted her to the Hospital Ship Comfort, where they told her she had gone so long without treatment that her second leg, too, was lost.
When she returned home weeks later, legless, her husband and children were gone. She found the four children, ages 13 to 6. Her husband never returned. He's somewhere in the Dominican Republic.
First Published January 13, 2011 12:00 am
