Women Inside Haiti's Hospital

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Day six: Because of a Haitian government directive, we now have to abandon our plans to continue to provide care in the massive sheet cities. We're a team of Bay Area healthcare providers, and this is my first ever relief work. When we worked in the sheet cities during the last days, I'd been amazed at the women of Haiti, amazed at both their suffering, and their strength. From now on, we'll work in a hospital, instead, and last night our organizers found one, named C.D.T.I. - a hospital that had been one of Haiti's premiere private facilities, now open to all, and in need of help from providers. As our bus neared this new hospital setting, heading closer into the epicenter of Port au Prince, the conversations on the bus drifted and died. Even accustomed as we were by this time to the sight of widespread devastation, we blinked as we rode through this increased level of destruction. We'd seen two-story high piles of imploded rubble before. We just hadn't seen so many of them, one after the other, with tilting walls that looked barely tethered by a thin leash of rebar, looming over us as our bus rocked past.

Further in, the air thickened into visible, eye-watering pollution. The haze of drifting dust, the black greasy smell of diesel, and the ever-present nauseating cloy of decaying corpses had us, despite the heat, closing bus windows. Traffic crowded and wove all around us, snaking and writhing past – zipping moto-bikes, jeeps with people hanging off the sides, and overpacked garish metal-seated buses. Between the smells, the heat and the traffic-induced vertigo, I flushed and felt my stomach lurch – I could almost feel each fleck of chewed mango slosh in the shallow puddle of inta-coffee-fake-milk mix I'd had for breakfast – and I wondered if I was going to spend the day in a corner of Haiti's premiere private hospital, hugging a plastic emesis bucket.

We turned a corner and a tall, narrow sign, still upright after the earthquake, proudly proclaimed C.D.T.I.'s location - and it's hours "Open 24/24, 7/7.” The hospital, like almost all Haitian structures of any worth, was surrounded by a prison-grade wall. It was clear our bus wasn't supposed to go through the metal gates, so we parked around the block and walked in.

The gates actually were the entrance to the parking lot, which had become, since the earthquake, the emergency room. The hospital, beautiful and modern, had mostly withstood The Day, but the air was filled with the constant scream of saws, and you could see, inside the massive, glass-walled round turret, the constant flicker of welding torches.

The parking lot was covered with massive suspended sheets, like the food-court areas in American amusement-parks. People, even at this early hour, seething and moved and limped and wove between each other. It was hard to tell who was doing what, or why, the patients, staff and medical personnel all following invisible paths, like watching an anthill. There was clearly a pattern, we just didn't know it yet. Instinctively we moved to the one open-air space. And found other relief workers, also shifting from foot to foot, a hand shading a face, a low murmured word to a colleague nearby.

We didn't know what we were waiting for, or for how long. But by now, after six days working in Haiti, we didn't fret about it. We just waited, eying the patients who milled into the area around us, all of us undoubtedly thinking about who looked the sickest, who needed to be seen first. The patients - limping, walking, or being carried into the parking lot area through the gates - ignored us as we stood in an obvious circle, all of us wearing scrubs, proclaiming our foreignness in many ways, but the most obvious one being that we were standing out in the sun, off to the side, when there was perfectly good shade only a few steps away.

For the first time, while we waited, we saw American military, a few of whom were painfully young-looking.