PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Despair and hopelessness are written across the faces of Haitians crowded into the streets of this earthquake-ravaged city.
A team of medical professionals and volunteers organized by St. Mary Church in Milford arrived in Port-au-Prince Saturday afternoon and quickly became immersed in the exhaust-choked city, where children missing limbs hawk trinkets as armed military trucks roll through the center of town.
It is the children that get to West Haven school nurse Susan Marchitto.
“None of them have smiles,” she said. “Look across the street. They play in the dirt with no toys, no food.”

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Persistent children and desperate-looking men beg for money, some more forceful than others. A steady line of old cars and brightly painted vehicles called tap-taps files past the airport, making the air thick with smog and noisy with honking and squeaky brakes.
It is hard to tell how much the city has recovered from the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 and left 1 million homeless. The city appears collapsed and desperate and lost, but the team’s guide says it always looks like this.
“A lot of poverty, but I can’t tell if it has changed since the earthquake,” said Sangeetha Thiviyarajah, a third-year resident at Bridgeport Hospital.
But there are glimmers of hope hidden among the chaos.
One nurse with the team, Agathe Mezile from Milford Hospital, was reunited with her sister at the airport. Mezile, who is from Haiti, brought her sister a fully cooked turkey and a ham on the plane. She said her sister lost her house in the quake and has been living in a tent.
Mezile said goodbye to her sister and is heading to Marbial to help heal her people.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

The first leg of the mission seems simple: Get the team, its belongings and 20 suitcases full of medical supplies and medicine safely from Port-au-Prince to Marbial, a poor, rural village nestled in the mountains of central Haiti. The trip involves traveling along a winding, mountain road from the earthquake-devastated capital city to Jacmel, a southern port city known for its beautiful French-inspired architecture and vibrant arts scene. Jacmel suffered widespread damage in the earthquake and is struggling to recapture its bustling pre-disaster culture and tourist economy.
From there, the road to Marbial, if you can call it a road, follows a rock-strewn riverbed that floods in the rainy season. The 10-mile, slow-going trip isolates Marbial from the bigger cities in Haiti, giving the village a quainter, more peaceful feel, but also cutting the people off from what little medical and social resources the country has to offer. Even in the cities, access to hospitals and medical care costs money, and many of the people most desperate for care can’t afford to pay for it. Without the most basic level of health care, many of the poorest Haitians don’t live long. Treatable chronic disease such as high blood pressure and diabetes are widespread killers.
The team was hoping to secure vaccines for diseases like diphtheria, tetanus and typhoid, but was unable to get them. Instead, they will likely be treating children for terrible, deadly diseases that could have been prevented with a basic vaccination program.
Part of the church’s and the medical team’s vision is to become a long-term presence in Marbial. The group’s ultimate goal is to set up a permanent health care clinic in the village and help get the people more reliable access to doctors and medicine.
In the future, they hope to administer vaccines to children rather than treat their preventable infections.
For now, the team has one week to make the biggest impact possible and give the people of Marbial a little bit of hope for the future.

A CONNECTION

The idea for the medical mission was born three years ago when St. Mary Church became a member of the Parish Twinning Program of the Americas, an organization that matches Roman Catholic parishes in the United States with sister parishes in less-developed countries.
St. Mary was connected to St. Therese Church in Marbial, which sits alongside a river. The people of Marbial are poor, but there is not the feeling of desperation and despair that is palpable in post-disaster Port-au-Prince.
Village life centers on the river. The river is silty, brown in color, and is used for everything from washing clothes and bathing, even for drinking water. Children in the village walk for miles to get to school. The only electricity in the village is supplied by a generator in the church that was donated by St. Mary Church.
St. Mary takes good care of its sister parish.
Since the spring of 2007, St. Mary has raised tens of thousands of dollars — more than $16,000 for educating the parish’s 500 students and $20,000 for the medical mission. It has already started fund-raising efforts to support another medical mission to Marbial next spring.
In addition to the church, the individual members of the medical team raised funds to buy medicine and supplies that will be used in the makeshift medical clinic in Marbial and the surgery set-up in Jacmel. Just days before the trip, Bridgeport Hospital pediatrician Mary Lou Gaeta accepted a $1,100 donation from the Mercy Learning Center in Bridgeport. It was one of many generous donations to the mission that will enable the team to have a bigger impact and help people stay healthy longer.
The last leg of the trip to Marbial involves turning onto an extremely bumpy dirt road through the mountains and then connecting with the even more treacherous riverbed.
It is getting dark, and the team has its work cut out for it. The next morning, they will set up the clinic where they will try to bring some miracles to Marbial.

Contact Abbe Smith at 203-789-5615 or at asmith@nhregister.com.

Editor’s note: Nearly two months after the earthquake in Haiti, the devastation is no longer front-page news. But the desperate nation needs help more than ever. A team of doctors and volunteers organized by St. Mary Church in Milford arrived in Haiti Saturday. Register reporter Abbe Smith is with them and, for the next week, will document their efforts.