DAME MARIE, Haiti — In this most western tip of Haiti, 300 patients with festering wounds lay silently on beds at the main hospital in the seaside village of Dame Marie waiting for medicine a week after Hurricane Matthew hit the remote peninsula.
Among the injured was Beauvoir Luckner, a cobbler and farmer who walked 12 km in three days after a tree crushed his leg and killed his mother when it fell on their house. His leg might have to be amputated, but all doctors can do is clean his wounds because the hospital has run out of everything, including pain killers.
“There’s no water, no antibiotics,” Dr. Herby Jean said. “Everything is depleted ... We hear helicopters flying overhead, but we’re not getting anything.”
There was also no power and frustration grew on Tuesday as food, medicine and fresh water kept arriving at the main city in Haiti’s southwest peninsula but was slow to reach increasingly desperate communities like Dame Marie.
Meanwhile, Luckner lay on a mattress with no sheets and a bandage around his left leg.
“It took a lot of misery to get here and now that I’m here, there’s still misery,” he said.
Meanwhile, at a cramped police station serving as a makeshift clinic in the nearby town of Marfranc, Darline Derosier fastened IV drips to jail cell bars, wiped the brows of cholera patients and tended to the wounds of those injured in the storm.
She was the only health worker helping about 40 patients inside the station bereft of police as she waited for help to arrive. Among the patients was an elderly woman lying unconscious on a jail cell floor with a leg bandaged in an old rag and a man with gashes around his neck, his eyes fluttering.
“People will die soon if we don’t get some aid,” an overwhelmed Derosier said.
The UN humanitarian agency in Geneva has made an emergency appeal for nearly $120 million in aid, saying about 750,000 people in southwest Haiti alone will need “life-saving assistance and protection” in the next three months. UN officials said earlier that at least 1.4 million people across the region need assistance and that 2.1 million overall have been affected by the hurricane. Some 175,000 people remain in shelters.
