Chery and Laurens Van Der Mark and their family are missionaries living and working in Haiti for Mission of Hope: Haiti under the auspices of Feed the Children Canada. Seeing the pictures of the destruction of Port au Prince on television have been heart rending, but reading the first hand account of the earthquake and the devastation through the eyes of a front line participant brought this tragedy home to me more than the television accounts ever could. In the hope that you’ll take the time to read the full blog by Cheryl Van Der Mark, I’ve posted a few quotes here.
First the earthquake itself …
“I remember seeing the concrete walls moving violently in a wave like at a wave pool. One to my right, one to my left and then one in front of me moving in a different direction. I also remember the ceiling was moving in a wave above me. The floor beneath my feet did not feel attached to me.”
The Van Der Marks live on a hill outside of the city. This is what Cheryl saw a few minutes after the quake.
“Then I stood up and turned around……From our rural hill not far from Port au Prince, we have a [view] of the whole city. As I looked out towards the city and the ocean, that is when I realized what had just happened. The entire city went up in dust. One huge even dust cloud arose from the entire massive city. It was like a bomb had gone off and it was the smoke rising.”
Then the injured began arriving to their small clinic.
“That may have been enough to deal with except that we realized that we had a team of 53 Canadian’s visiting on a short term mission trip. We went into leader mode. Laurens went to check on a few things and I gathered the team. Grant went to get the ambulance and I gathered the visiting nurses and doc. We jumped into the ambulance and headed down to the clinic. Grant took the team in and I rushed to the front gate of our mission. By the time I got there, the injured started arriving. They came in tap tap (pick up truck taxi) after tap tap. Children, woman and men.
Their arms and legs were crushed, their bones sticking out of their bodies, their heads gashed open. Some crying in pain, some barely alive. 5, 6, 7, people per truck.
After a few minutes I left the gate and security took over letting them all in and I rushed back to the hospital. For the next 33 hours straight we worked on the traumatic cases that lie before us. It looked like war. We did not know the integrity of the clinic yet so we could not go inside. The aftershocks started to come and were frequent but less in intensity. We had to get supplies in side but ran back out every aftershock we got. The injured were lying all over our outside walk way. Grant, our visiting nurses and myself worked on triaging the worst patients. We are not a full service hospital, we are just a clinic…..we started to get reports that the biggest hospital in PAP, General hospital had crashed down, Doctors without Borders had crashed (the only 2 main ER’s in the entire city!). We got further reports that other hospitals were down. We started to realize, that we were all there was for miles and miles and miles.”
The flow of wounded only stopped when the taxis ran out of diesel.
“We went home and slept 6 hours. Then opened the clinic again. We worked another 10 hours, seeing the same things. Finally it stopped. There were no more tap tap’s running as there was no more diesel for their vehicles.”
What does one say as a Christian as one looks at this tragedy?
“Rachel (missionary here) and I were just saying today that if someone had told us that this is what we would have had to do this week prior to this event, we would have “quit”. We would have said no way God! I can’t do all of that. We would have underestimated our abilities based on what we were comfortable with. We have learned that God knows more than we do, that He knows what we can handle and He has more faith in us than we have in ourselves.”
I hope you have the time to read Cheryl’s full blog. If you would like to donate you can do so on her blogsite or through Feed the Children Canada.
Thanks for reading,
Peter