American doctors are begging their Government to accept critically injured Haitian children after one baby girl was airlifted to hospital in Florida.
Meanwhile, in an exercise dubbed Operation Pierre Pan, the Catholic Church in Miami is drawing up plans to rescue thousands of Haitian orphans, mirroring the Operation Pedro Pan airlift of 1960 in which 14,000 Cuban children were taken to the city.
US immigration officials had been refusing to allow children into the country until next weekend. However, as Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, arrived to assure Haitians that America stood ready to help “in any way we can”, doctors managed to persuade the US authorities to allow in Jean, a four-month-old Haitian girl for treatment. The orphaned child has cut through immigration rules used to bar entry to the US for Haitians even in extreme circumstances.
The charity Medishare had been considering defying US immigration by putting Jean physically in the giant hands of Alonzo Mourning, a basketball star, who has given millions to the charity and spent three days last week clearing rubbish in its tented clinic in Port-au-Prince. “We wanted to have him on the plane and carry the kid through Customs,” Arthur Fournier, a founder of Medishare, said. In the event US officials relented.
However, by Saturday night only 23 Haitians had been admitted to US hospitals.
Jean, as she was named by medics, was pulled from the wreckage of her home on Saturday. She was barely alive after spending 85 hours without water. Her parents are thought to have died in the rubble of their home.
Taken to a tented clinic on the city’s main UN compound, Jean was resuscitated and then flown to Fort Lauderdale. She was recovering yesterday at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami.
“We can’t evacuate any Haitian patients to the US,” John McDonald, from the University of Miami Medical School, said. “Our country treats the Haitians like s***. The people land, they get sent back. When Cubans land, they open restaurants.”
Another doctor at the tented clinic said that she was so desperate at being forced to discharge children still in grave danger of dying from infection that she wanted to “scream and scratch people”. For want of bed space “we are sending wounded children back on to the streets of Port-au-Prince with no plan even for how they will be fed,” said Jennifer Furn, from Harvard Medical School.
Dr Furn’s task was complicated by instructions from the UN to vacate the tents by 8am yesterday. “The UN say they need these tents as a staging post for regular personnel,” Dr Furn said. “It’s breaking my heart. How can I send children with wounds and head bandages out into the streets?”
A spokesman for Minustah, the permanent UN operation in Haiti, insisted that alternative premises were being found, but there was no sign of them hours before the deadline.
In Miami, church representatives are lobbying the US Department of Homeland Security to allow Haitian children left homeless or without parents to be given shelter in the US. The archdiocese has been deluged with offers of help from families, including Cubans who came to Miami as youngsters during Pedro Pan — the Spanish name for Peter Pan — 50 years ago.
“We, the former Pedro Pan children, have a solemn duty to help these children benefit from our unique experience, so that one day they have the tools to return to their homeland and help rebuild it,” said Carmen Valdivia, 60, who was sent to Miami by her parents at 12 to save her from communist indoctrination.
The plan, which is still at a preliminary stage, is being spearheaded by Deacon Richard Turcotte, the chief executive officer of the archdiocese’s community aid wing, Catholic Charities. “It could be a tremendous opportunity to stabilise these children and help heal them from this terrible, terrible disaster,” Mr Turcotte said.
Pedro Pan was the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied children in the western hemisphere. It remained a secret for three decades.
Back in Port-au-Prince, Mr Mourning sat exhausted, inured to the screaming of a boy whose broken leg had been reset without painkillers. “The US is an hour and a half from here,” he said. “The children here have devastating injuries and we can only patch them up. It makes no sense. We can help everybody here if we get our priorities straight.”
In this clinic, as in others, the suffering, the stoicism and the heroism of the doctors are remarkable. It is hard to apportion blame when hundreds are working bravely; it is hard also to avoid the suspicion that bureaucracies within the UN and the US are, at times, behaving as if this earthquake never happened.
Meanwhile, Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, has spoken of the “thin line between medicine and media” after he was left in charge of 20 critically injured patients when a UN team of Belgian doctors left because of security fears. Critics accused CNN of exploiting the situation and blurring reporting after Dr Gupta, 40, a neurosurgeon who turned down an invitation last year to become US Surgeon-General, was shown tending to a 15-day-old baby. He wrote on Twitter: “Yes, I am a reporter, but a doctor first.”
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