By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
As Kathy Spiegelhoff and nine other members of Friends of the Children group waited out Hurricane Matthew last week, the priest in whose home they were staying put the storm into perspective.
“He said, ‘This is a windstorm, not an earthquake,’” Spiegelhoff recalled.
Spiegelhoff arrived home about 10:30 p.m. Monday night, three days after she was supposed to return from a two-week medical mission to Haiti. She flew into Fort Lauderdale Monday morning and then back to Chicago Monday evening.
She left behind a country devastated by Hurricane Matthew. Parts of Haiti, according NASA, received close to 30 inches of rain. The impoverished nation – with many in huts that have no floors and corrugated tin roofs – has reported at least 1,000 died in the storm.
It was Spiegelhoff’s 14th trip to the Caribbean nation. A registered nurse who works full-time at Gooseberries food market, she and the group travel twice a year with medical supplies to the village of La Croix in La Montagne. The group does everything from filling cavities in teeth to delivering babies.
“They do whatever they can,” Kathy’s daughter, Abby Galstad, said last week as she passed on word that her mother was stranded in the aftermath of the storm.
Through it all, Spiegelhoff said she was never in danger.
“I think it was harder for them here at home, because I knew we were in a safe environment,” Spiegelhoff said of her family. “They could only go off what was shown on TV.
“I kept trying to reassure them.”
A change in course
On Sept. 30, Kathy and her husband, David, were exchanging texts about the storm. At that point, the storm looked to be heading toward Jamaica.
But in the next 24 hours, the storm pushed further west than expected. By the morning of Oct. 2, Spiegelhoff and the group – in Jacmel at a hotel for the weekend – were told to make their way back up the mountain to the Catholic church where they perform their work.
Kathy texted Dave that evening.
“This is so weird,” she wrote, “waiting for (expletive) to hit the proverbial fan.”
By that night, Kathy said, it was raining gently. By the next morning, she and the residents of the island nation were in the midst of the first Category 4 hurricane to hit the nation in 40-plus years.
Weathering the storm
For the next two days, Kathy and the medical mission group lived in the home of the priest. Their dormitory was deemed unsafe due to a church bell tower weakened in a 2010 earthquake.
The clinic was closed Monday afternoon after a patient came in originally to be treated – and then came back later to have her arm set after she broke it slipping on wet rocks.
Kathy’s cell phone became her way of documenting the storm – both through texts home and through pictures and video. At times, the building they were in “was just vibrating” with the wind.
The photos show entire swaths of normally green countryside turned brown, the results of rain tearing apart the hillside. Rivers were swollen to three or four times their normal widths, and the rain and wind obscured virtually all sights and sounds at times.
“It was actually raining so hard, sideways, that it peeled the paint off the cement blocks,” Kathy said. “You could not see more than, like, 20 feet.”
By the morning of Oct. 5, the majority of the rain had stopped, and patients began trickling into the clinic. Surgery had to be performed on one young girl whose face had been gashed above and below her left eye by a rock of some sort.
Damage everywhere
Spiegelhoff detailed several collapsed structures, but said the village of La Croix escaped the most serious of damage.
“Our village fared fairly well,” she explained. She and the group worked at the clinic until last weekend, when they made their way down the mountain in a local villager’s truck.
However, while there was no flooding where they were, the driving rain did a enough damage. Medical supplies that had been covered before the storm were soaked through, and the group did laundry one morning and hung it to dry – only to find it still wet when they returned in the evening.
“I actually had dry linen bags that mildewed down there, it was so humid,” Kathy said. “You could just see the moisture rolling in. It just saturated everything for days, even after it stopped raining.”
It wasn’t until the group got down the mountain to the hotel in Jacmel and onto a small plane to Port-au-Prince that the true scope of the damage became clear.
“The western peninsula looked like an atomic bomb went off,” Kathy said.
Moving forward
Kathy’s immediate concerns were making sure villagers who relied on the group for medical supplies had insulin and blood pressure medication. The villagers trained in basic First-Aid – called the Caritas – were set to hold a blood-pressure clinic Tuesday.
With much of the nation’s crops and fruit trees destroyed in the storm, Kathy said she is also concerned that people will starve. Airdrops of supplies were supposed to be starting soon.
Kathy also said she and other members of the group felt tremendous relief when the nation’s presidential election was postponed, as it had been expected to be controversial – to the point where riots may have taken place.
She said she never feared for her own safety, though, knowing the villagers they had been working with for years would protect them if needed.
Now, though, the most pressing need is the majority of the medical supplies at the group’s clinic that were destroyed by the storm. Galstad said fundraising is going to be a major focus in coming weeks.
Galstad said if people would like to donate, checks can be made out to “Friends of the Children” and mailed to Friends of the Children, Attn. Linda Underwood, 1805 Kings Highway, Rockford, IL, 61107.
One hundred percent of the funds will go directly to helping residents of Haiti at the clinic.
-
-
-
-
-