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Jason McKinley is on his way back to Haiti.

He’s traveling with his wife, Mary Beth, and others from Gethsemane Baptist Church in Danville on a mission that was scheduled months before the earthquake reduced much of the island country to rubble and misery beyond words.

Not that McKinley’s return trip will be a walk in the park — the needs in Haiti remain overwhelming — but it might seem like a stay at a four-star resort compared to the 10-day commando-style relief mission he undertook last month.

Watching the disaster unfold on television, McKinley felt compelled to help out beyond texting a donation. He tried to volunteer through established relief organizations like Red Cross, but the red tape proved too slow and frustrating so McKinley found a backdoor way in.

His friend, Brian Holton, is a registered nurse who works in the emergency room at Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center. Holton has family working as missionaries in the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti, so the two Stanford men hastily collected medical supplies donated by the hospital and Stanford businesses, crammed them into totes and booked flights to Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, arriving on Jan. 19.

Helping the injured

From there, the pair caught a bus for the six-hour ride, much of it along dirt roads humming with refugees and supply trucks, to the border town of Jimani, about 25 miles from Port-au-Prince, the devastated Haitian capital.

Using connections provided by Holton’s family, the two men headed for a medical compound in Jimani where they heard a single doctor was performing 30 amputations a day.

“It was like ‘The Amazing Race,’” Holton said. “We were standing on the corner, holding up signs, waiting for a stranger to pick us up.”

Once at the clinic, McKinley and Holton found that doctors and nurses from around the world had arrived to treat the sick and wounded.

“There were a lot of broken bones, severe burns, spinal injuries, head injuries,” McKinley said. “There was a lot of help at that point, but it was pretty chaotic. There were all these different languages and a power struggle over who was in charge. The major things got done, but there was a total lack of organization.”

Holton’s training as a nurse enabled him to go to work quickly in an intensive care unit set up in two air-conditioned trailers. McKinley has plenty of useful skills — he’s a rock climbing guide and trained wilderness first-responder among other things — but it took him a while to find his niche.

“I don’t have a lot of medical training, but I know basic first aid and have done a lot of bandaging,” he said. “At first, I didn’t have anything to do. I hooked up with the Peace Corps picking up trash.”

McKinley worked his way up to driving ambulances and moving victims to different facilities around the compound. He and Holton worked the night shift in 16-hour stretches, sleeping on mats on the floor during down time.

“We didn’t have everything we needed, medicine, antibiotics. No X-rays or CTs. One lady died because we didn’t have a ventilator,” Holton said. “There was a lot of guesswork as to what the injuries were.

“But we didn’t have to do all the paperwork we do in this country. We just gave them medicine, patted them on the butt and sent them out the door. Half my time (at Ephraim McDowell) is spent charting, so without that much paperwork, we were able to see a lot more people.”

Overwhelming

suffering

After four days in Jimani, Holton and McKinley learned of a more critical need in Port-au-Prince. There, they worked at a street clinic treating as many as 500 people a day. The clinic only operated during the day. At night, Holton and McKinley slept outside in lawn chairs.

Much of the work at the street clinic was fairly routine, bandaging wounds and handing out water, but there were horrific exceptions.

“These two men came in, both of them with both arms broken,” McKinley said. “They were attacked at a Western Union after they picked up some money.”

Throughout their stay, the pair were exposed to suffering that at times was overwhelming, with the wails of orphans for their dead parents perhaps the most heartwrenching.

Yet, McKinley said the undeniable spirit of the Haitian people — often smiling and chanting in the face of unspeakable misery — buoyed their hearts and kept them motivated.

“We were able to get pretty close to people. If they were all screaming and crying all the time, it would have been extremely hard,” said McKinley, a skilled photographer who took dozens of pictures during his stay.

“I didn’t want to capture just the despair and sadness. I wanted to document the scene but also the beauty of the people and the strength, smiling through broken limbs without pain medication, singing praise songs at night.”

McKinley and Holton returned on Jan. 30. Holton is back to work at the hospital, while McKinley has been getting ready for today’s trip back to Haiti with the group from Gethsemane.

“It’s overwhelming the amount of need that is still there,” Holton said. “Thousands of people will die for lack of proper care and infected wounds. They’re going to have health care needs for months and months. I’m worried people won’t go anymore after the media quits talking about it.”

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