The week in Haiti

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.

Rotary Funded Project Rotary Project in Thibeau, Haiti

The Rotary Club located in Jacmel, Haiti, and along with help from the Burlington North and Mississauga Rotary Clubs in Ontario, Canada, supports our dental clinic in Thibeau.  This clinic has undergone major renovation in September 2007 as you can see by clicking on: Thibeau Clinic Photos

Haiti need not be a failing state. Its problems are fixable if only the world community co-ordinates

Beyond the begging bowl

Haiti is on all the lists of “failing states”. Yet the persistence of its troubles demonstrates not so much their intractability as the past incompetence of the international community in helping to tackle them. Haiti should not be a failing state: its fundamentals such as neighbourhood are remarkably favourable. Its problems are fixable if the international community moves beyond gestures to a co-ordinated use of a range of policies: security, trade, governance and aid.