PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Almost every wing of St. Francois de Sales Hospital lies in ruins. But about 68 doctors and nurses have turned what is left into a triage center that performed at least 17 operations yesterday.
The collapse of the Lycee Marie-Jeanne, a school for girls, has turned it into a crypt for scores of eighth graders. But staff members report there daily to comb through the debris for whatever they can salvage to help reopen the school.
A dozen officers were killed when last week's earthquake flattened the police precinct at Delmas 32. But those who are left have filled the open shifts and organized meetings with residents to discuss strategies for fending off looters.
One week after the disaster that left Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas in ruins, the toll on this country has been measured almost entirely in lives. But Haiti's institutions, weak as they were, have been grievously wounded too. A day immersed in this country's struggle to recover makes it clear that their absence leaves a palpable void.
"The country was fairly dysfunctional before this," said former Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis. "The institutions were weak. People were left largely on their own. But this has wiped out everything."
While the world has rushed to rescue those trapped in the rubble, and provide assistance to the tens of thousands left without shelter, food and water, Haitians have jumped in as well to help the relief effort, to slowly begin the gargantuan task of digging out and carrying on.
Fledgling efforts were visible in Peguyville, where leaders have organized camps filled with thousands of those left homeless into committees responsible for everything from security to burning trash.
Haitians in Carrefour have volunteered with Adventist missionaries to help operate feeding programs and water purification stations. And at the University of Haiti, professors summoned students by text messages and deputized them to serve as trauma counselors for a shocked population.
"The state is broken, the people are broken, but it is time to mobilize," said psychology student Tirone Joel, 24.
Every corner of the St. Francois de Sales Hospital courtyard was occupied by people wounded in the earthquake. Medical experts said the hospital is considered a reference facility for the country, and trains dozens of doctors, nurses and lab technicians each year. Established by nuns in the late 1800s, the hospital reserves half of its 140 beds for the poor. After the earthquake, a wing of the dormitory has been converted to operating rooms managed by a 73-year-old nurse named Maxis Astevelne.
Stepping away from an operating table where doctors were suturing the skull of an 8-year-old boy, the nurse said she was proud of the way her colleagues had pulled together to save lives. Her own husband's body still lay beneath the rubble of her house, she said. But she has been at the hospital every day to help get it up and running.
"We don't get paid much," she said. "And we don't have all the equipment we want. But we do the best with what God has given us."
The water system in Haiti before the earthquake may not have been fair or ideal: Rich neighborhoods and hotels received chlorinated water from one set of pipes, while everyone else relied on city water pumped in for part of the day, augmented by water trucks that appeared daily in neighborhoods. Still, most of the sprawling city had access to water.
But now, the public water utility in Port-au-Prince, the Centrale Autonome Metropolitaine d'Eau Potable, has come to a virtual standstill.
The central payment office downtown, with cracks running up the outside walls, has been abandoned, along with local branches in many neighborhoods.
Patchwork solutions were surfacing. One of several efforts to stand in for the broken-down agency could be seen. On the agency's lawn, a team of 10 Germans had set up a filtration system that cleaned city water and pumped it into round portable pools and huge vinyl mattresses -- essentially making giant waterbeds.
The filters produce about 160,000 liters of potable water a day, or enough for around 30,000 people, said Sven Guericke, team leader from the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief. But he said he still needed government help to complete the task.
First Published: January 20, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
