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One month ago today, Dr. Louise Ivers was in a meeting at the World Food Programme (WFP) office in Port-au-Prince when the ground began to shake. As first it was just a slight rumble, so that she thought that what she was feeling was perhaps the vibration of heavy construction equipment. But then the ground began to shake so violently that it was hard to stand up. "I fell over," says Ivers. "People started screaming, and we could hear the cracking sounds as the buildings shook and fell."
Everything moved in slow motion, so that the 30 to 40 seconds of the earthquake seemed to last far longer. Ivers finally made it to the exit, but a woman had fallen in the doorway, and in the rush to get out, people were stepping on and tripping over her. Outside, there was dust everywhere, shaken loose from the earth as buildings fell. "There was an eerie kind of color to the sky. It was twilight, and the dust made everything yellow," says Ivers. "It was chaotic, like Armageddon."
All along the street, buildings had crashed to the ground. A wall had fallen, pinning a woman underneath. Outside the U.N. compound, a bus lay on its side, a telegraph pole slicing its middle. Electric poles had collapsed, and people were electrocuted by the dancing wires. The streets were filled with wailing people, and someone said in French, "It's a pity we don't have a doctor here." "I'm a doctor," Ivers replied—she is an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and the Haiti country director for Partners in Health (PIH). "And that was the dividing line between remembering every detail and going into a blur for the next four days," she says.
Images of Port-au-Prince, right after the earthquake
With just the first aid kits from the U.N. vehicles, Ivers began treating people. The wounded kept coming to the U.N. because they assumed that there, they would find help. "A man handed me his child, who was about 1, across the U.N. barrier," says Ivers. "The skin on the child's forearm was completely ripped off, and the arm was bleeding profusely, as if she'd been trapped beneath something, and the skin had come off in the efforts to pull the child out."
In less than an hour, there were about 300 injured people on the ground of the U.N. compound. Ivers was the only doctor there. She made tourniquets from torn shirts, and stabilized bones using debris and license plates ripped from cars. She used stickers from her presentation at WFP to set up a triage system, putting red stickers on the foreheads of those with limb and life threatening wounds, and yellow on the less critically injured. She spent the entire night working, saving some lives, but losing others. "Five people bled to death, including the woman who was crushed by the wall," Ivers says.
At 7 the next morning, Ivers, who has lived in Haiti for seven years, was able to convince the U.N. to transport patients to a military medical base in their buses. In times like these, Ivers says, the U.N. typically evacuates its own, mainly foreigners. "That's what happened in Rwanda," she says. But when she got to the military compound, she was told that they would only let in U.N. staff, and the patients were placed in the logistics base—basically a large tent used to warehouse materials. Again, Ivers was the only doctor there. She asked the person in charge at the base if she could use their satellite phone to call PIH headquarters in Boston. PIH has a network of Haitian doctors, and Ivers knew that if PIH could get the alert out, the doctors would come to help. But the person in charge refused, though 95 percent of the people Ivers had brought with her had life or limb threatening injuries.
"He said, 'I don't care about Haitian civilians. I don't want people to come in here to die,'" Ivers recalls. "Granted, he had to consider keeping the U.N. compound secure, but I was dumbfounded."
Ivers continued to treat patients as best she could. She was overwhelmed, having to face such suffering without the necessary tools or medication to help. Relief finally came a day later, 48 hours after the earthquake, when surgeons from the University of Miami arrived to help. Joia Mukherjee, PIH's medical director, arrived shortly thereafter and Ivers worked for half a day with PIH staff until Mukherjee told her to go home. Ivers hadn't eaten or slept in two days. "I did want to see my husband, to hug the people I love," she says, "but I didn't want to abandon my team."
A month after the earthquake, Ivers still has a daily reminder of the destruction caused that day. In the initial chaos right after the earthquake, she went frantically searching for her driver, Mede, (ironically pronounced "mayday"), who had parked her car a few blocks from the U.N.. When she found him, he was fine, but a wall had collapsed on her car. She drives around in it now, though it is dented and taped up in places to hold it together. "Mede and I have said the car is like most of the rest of Haiti," says Ivers. "It is bashed up, but we're motoring along anyway."