A night flight out of Port-au-Prince

Nurse Erik Bartkowiak accompanied four critically ill patients on a medevac plane out of Haiti to receive the medical treatments they desperately needed–treatments that no medical facility in Haiti could provide. Read his story below.

Nurse Erik Bartkowiak (above) and his father (below) tending to patients on their 5 hour flight from Port-au-Prince to Philadelphia.

I would like to give you my account of the events of January 16, 2010, when I worked with Drs Joia Mukherjee and Evan Lyon and their Haitian colleagues to evacuate four Haitian survivors of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince.  I am a Registered Nurse with over 12 years of emergency and trauma experience.

Previous to this, I was in the US army, and only mention this because, in a strange coincidence, I was part of a 7-man special operations team that helped remove Raul Cedras and reinstate Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in the fall of 1994.

Remote Area Medical Travels to Haiti to Assist in Earthquake Relief Efforts

Founder Stan Brock Pilots Historic C47/DC-3 Aircraft Loaded with Medical Relief Supplies and Equipment

Remote Area Medical®, a nonprofit volunteer organization that offers free healthcare services in underdeveloped countries and in the U.S., announced today that it will be setting up its RAM operations to assist in the Haiti earthquake relief efforts at the Jimani Project facility in Jimani, Dominican Republic, on the Haitian border. Founder Stan Brock and RAM volunteers loaded more than a ton of medical relief supplies and equipment for Haitian earthquake victims onto RAM’s historic C47/DC-3 aircraft on Friday, January 15 at McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tenn. The RAM aircraft will ferry supplies and personnel to the Barahona, Dominican Republic airfield. Brock and RAM medical personnel will be traveling back and forth from Barahona to where a small clinic has been set up to assist the victims of the earthquake.

ECOND ANNUAL REMOTE AREA MEDICAL CLINIC AT LMU SERVES ALMOST 700

Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) and Remote Area Medical (RAM) joined together over the weekend to hold the second annual RAM Health Expedition at LMU. The expedition – RAM’s 500th such effort – provided free medical, dental, and optical care to almost 700 individuals in just two days.