Unsettled

The truth is, I haven't slept more than an hour at a time these last few days. My mind is running wild. I can't keep my eyes dry and my heart aches in a way I haven't felt since my first day on the ground in Haiti. I don't know what to do. I'm lost and trying to make sense of the situation. The people I care so much about and to whom I have dedicated my life to helping, are dying before me. This feeling of helplessness is more than I can bare. I don't want to be here anymore. I want to be there with them. I want to be where they are dying, just to be present and to apologize. I want to hold them and tell them that it's ok. I want them to know that their lives matter to me. I want them to know that they won't be forgotten.

I'm sitting here on campus, waist deep in my medical school studies while my mind is traversing the dirty streets of Port-au-Prince, counting the dead bodies that cover the ground, breathing in the air of absolute destruction, hearing the cries of the children at the side of their lifeless parents and the prayers of the mothers and fathers with their arms reaching out to the sky, desperate for something, anything to help them.

I was on the phone with a friend and colleague in the Dominican Republic when the earthquake started. He told me that the ground was shaking. I told him to look out the window and see if a big truck was passing by, if that could've been the cause of his little house shaking. I knew it wasn't a truck, when he began yelling for help, exclaiming that his roof was caving in. I told him to get out of the house and away from the building to hold on to something.

Two hours later, I heard the news that Haiti had been hit by the largest earthquake it has seen in the last 200 years. My heart sunk and my throat closed. The email read that several of the homes of people I knew well and worked heavily with, were demolished. It's a nightmare and I don't know who I can talk to about it. Everywhere I turn, people are apologizing, offering to help in whatever way they can and asking me if I'm ok. Of course I'm not ok. When that earthquake hit, I couldn't breathe. I felt as though I was in the center of it and that everything around me was falling apart. I wanted to be there when it happened. I wanted to suffer with the ones I cared about. I want to be there right now. I want to do everything that I can.

They need more people who speak Creole. They need more people who know their way around. It's so hard for me to sit here and think to myself that it's best to wait and that little good can come from me being there right now. So I've decided to do everything I can while I'm here. Working with President Ruth Simmons and several doctors and officials at Brown, we've formed the Brown Haiti Crisis Response Committee to design ways of raising money that can be immediately applied to address the most urgent needs of those in Haiti. I'm also working with Dr. Flannigan and several members of the Global Health Initiative at Brown as a leader in the Haiti working group aimed at creating long-term educational and professional relationships between the Brown Medical Schools and both government and non-governmental organizations in Haiti.