An injured Haitian named Pastor Isaac made an impression Vicksburg physician Dr. Daniel Edney said he will remember.

Pastor Isaac served as an interpreter for the medical mission team from Vicksburg as they treated the French- and Creole-speaking residents of the earthquake-devastated island.

“He was on crutches working hard and smiling,” Edney said. “I looked at his ankle. He had a broken ankle. He had been hauling around a broken ankle for nearly a month and had never had it treated. He never complained.”

The Vicksburg team joined by another from Kentucky flew Jan. 31 to the Caribbean island, landing in Haiti’s neighboring country, the Dominican Republic, and undertaking an eight-hour bus ride to the area where a magnitude-7 earthquake struck and killed nearly 200,000 people on Jan. 12.

“It was an eye-opener,” Vicksburg team member Michael Jones said, describing his arrival. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my lifetime. The city itself was in rubble.”

The team also included Vicksburg First Baptist clinic lab technician Hester Pitts. “There was so much I don’t think I was prepared for, for that magnitude earthquake,” she said.

The two teams stayed and worked in the capital city, Port au Prince, for eight days, six days shorter than scheduled.

Edney said officials of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Disaster Response shortened the rotation to allow more volunteers to alternate in and to alleviate some of the stress of working in an intense environment for a long period of time.

“They can only handle so many people at one time,” Edney said, noting that each team member had to be housed and fed while trying to help the wounded.

Their role was to relieve pressure on city hospitals.

“We saw a classic, trauma-type disaster,” said Edney, who has been on many medical missions, including post-tsunami work in Indonesia. “There were a lot of issues related to the earthquake like broken ankles, broken arms.” He also said his team treated many infections and saw many people with post traumatic stress.

The team had packed their own stockpile of pre-labeled medicines of antibiotics and vaccines.

“I kept the medicine straight,” said Jones, a pharmacist and co-owner of Helping Hand Family Pharmacy. “(The doctors) tell me what they wanted and I give it to them. We gave a lot of tetanus shots and a lot of antibiotics.” Jones estimated nearly 6,000 prescriptions had been given out to the 1,126 patients they served.

“We did whatever was needed,” Pitts said. “I did triage, took blood pressure, wrapped a lot of ankles.”

She estimated she inoculated about 500 patients.

The team stayed in a house that belonged to a Florida Baptist Church that has had a presence in Haiti for over 30 years. “The building we stayed in was damaged, but it was livable,” Pitts said. They moved their medical post to another missionary compound after just three days. “We remained mobile from day-to-day,” Edney added. “We were trying to divert patients from the hospital,” because the hospitals were overloaded.

Edney said a spirit of helpfulness was evident in the island nation. “People there are trying to clean things up,” he said. “People are trying to help each other.”

Edney, Pitts and Jones said they’ll all go back if they’re called on to do so.

Contact Manivanh Chanprasith at mchan@vicksburgpost.com