Cooper team seeing human toll of Haitian earthquake

A medical mission from Camden, New Jersey will begin treating victims of Haiti’s earthquake today. The group flew into the capital city of Santo Domingo earlier this week but are now on the border of Haiti.

A medical mission from Camden, New Jersey will begin treating victims of Haiti’s earthquake today. The group flew into the capital city of Santo Domingo earlier this week but are now on the border of Haiti.

After a ten hour bus trip through the congested streets of the capital, and later, along winding mountainous roads, the group landed in the border town of Jimani.

Both aid workers and victims of last weeks’ earthquake have converged on the town, where two hospitals are treating hundreds of Haitians who arrive each day. Several doctors from the group visited a church where pews had been replaced by mattresses where amputees lay side by side. There they met a volunteer doctor named Marta Butler who helped run the facility.

Butler: What do you guys do?

We have a team of specialists.

Butler: What kind of specialists?

I’m a trauma care doctor, he’s a surgeon.

Butler: We need some help. we’ll take the help we can get.

The team also met doctors who had crossed the border to Haiti, but had returned to Jimani. Milton Steinman is a Brazilian doctor, who was surprised by the hospitals he visited on the other side of the border, in Haiti.

Steinman: We found two hospitals, one of them was almost closed, one of them with two doctors inside with no patients at all we don’t know why.

Steinman says the doctors themselves, did not know why they had no patients.

Back on the Dominican side, helicopters continued to land, and trucks continued to arrive, carrying the wounded from Port au Prince and other parts of Haiti.