First 12 Canadian Red Cross workers leave for Philippines
Field hospital will stay four months; staff will be on four-week rotations
Dr. Danielle Perreault, headed for the Philippines with the Canadian Red Cross, says her specialty is a perfect fit: “I’m a bush doctor.”
As a general practitioner with the Cree and Inuit around Hudson Bay, Perrault says, “I’m exposed to all sorts of things — trauma, heart attack. I can do deliveries, I can do some operations.
“And since my first love was the developing world,” she volunteered for overseas disaster work.
Perreault and 11 others are on their way to the city of Iloilo as part of a field hospital, which is a group of tents with as much medical equipment as they can pack.
The doctors and nurses will be there for four weeks. More volunteers will round out the four-month hospital commitment in shifts.
Most were smiling as they said goodbye to colleagues.
Perreault has served on disaster teams before, with the Red Cross in Georgia and with Médecins du Monde in Haiti.
“It will give me some background in what I should expect because I arrived in Haiti about 10 days after the earthquake (in 2010), so I know how deprived the personnel are, and the limits that we have as doctors in how to treat patients,” she said.
This time, unlike her Haiti experience, she will be in a field hospital. “That means there will be a lab, there will be X-rays, there will be a possibility (for her) to do small surgery, and there will be a surgeon” for the more complicated cases.
Working under difficult conditions overseas and in the North, she says, “is part of my genetic code.”
She says it’s always a case of working “where there are no mode d’emploi to deal with what’s coming” — no handy sheet of instructions.
The solution: “I’m used to sort of seeing the situation and taking it bit by bit. There’s even a psychologist to support us, so it’s teamwork.”
The biggest challenges are lack of food, and lack of all the supplies needed to treat 300 patients a day. It means the doctors have to make hard choices about which patients get priority.
“When I read ... that we are going to see 300 patients a day, I took in a big breath,” she said.
She leaves behind two children, but they are 25 and happy to get some freedom.
“I feel really privileged” to go.
Patrick Raymond is a nurse from Sherbrooke. He has treated cholera victims in Chad and flood victims in Mozambique. “It’s just inside me to go and help people who need it,” he said.
He sat his four-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, in front of the TV news of the Philippines and told them that Daddy is going there to help the sick people there. “They do understand.” “There’s a team already on site” that will organize things before the hospital arrives, he said. “They’re assessing what the needs are and (will) give us a specific place where we’ll do the work.”
The working hours will be long. “It’s difficult, but we have to see what we can do, not what we cannot do,” he said. “We focus on this.”
At least Raymond didn’t have to explain the situation to his wife. They met and married when he was on one of his missions to Africa.
The Canadian military is sending two Disaster Assistance Response Teams, or DARTs, as well.
Laureen Harper, the prime minister’s wife, visited the sendoff at the Red Cross building on Metcalfe Street and told the medical workers she’s proud of them.
“You’re a special group of men and women. You are choosing to get out of your comfort zone and serve others,” she said. “I got to tour your field hospital, and it was pretty impressive.”
Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team was heading to the Philippine city of Iloilo Wednesday to help Filipinos reeling from the devastating aftermath of typhoon Haiyan.
“The DART team is now on the way to Iloilo, which is one of the affected areas that has so far been less served by some of the humanitarian efforts,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at the Philippines embassy after signing a book of condolences. Iloilo, one of two major cities on the island of Panay, was in the direct path of typhoon Haiyan.
A Royal Canadian Air Force Challenger jet is taking a small group led by Afghan veteran Lt.-Col. Walter Taylor to a region that the Red Cross, Oxfam and the Philippines government have said is in urgent need of assistance since the gigantic storm, known locally as Typhoon Yolanda, swept through the densely populated, deeply impoverished archipelago on Friday.
DART brings with it a purification system that can turn bad water into 50,000 litres of good drinking water every day as well as other equipment to do basic repairs to infrastructure. Its 40-member medical team can provide basic medical care.
More than 10 million Filipinos spread across scores of islands have been seriously affected by typhoon Haiyan. Like Leyte, the provinces of Samar and Eastern Samar are entirely without power and likely to remain that way for some time to come. Other provinces that were hit hard include Capiz, northern Iloilo and parts of Bicol.
Although Manila only received heavy rains from typhoon Haiyan, which tracked from east to west about 850 kilometres south of the capital, the city is expected to deal with a huge influx of typhoon refugees in the next days and weeks.
Manila is the gateway for a crush of Filipinos from the diaspora who have been rushing home to find out the fate of their kin.
Although she already knows that Haiyan, has made her a widow, Marietta Bacarra, arrived from the Middle East on Wednesday to find out what has happened to the rest of her family in Tacloban.
Marietta’s husband, Rogelio Bacarra, drowned Saturday morning saving the lives of his mother, a sister and six nieces and nephews.
“They were all inside a concrete house but it crumbled and was washed out to sea when water from the ocean hit it,” Marietta said.
“Rogelio managed to keep everyone together, but then he was pulled away by the water.”
The 43-year-old housemaid learned what little she knew about her family from a Facebook message. She was talking to a large group of worried Filipinos who, like her, had returned to their homeland from jobs around the world with similarly tragic tales or had no news yet and were dreading what they might find out.
“My mother,” who happened to be in Manila when the typhoon hit, “says she had heard my father, husband, son and brothers are alive but we have had no direct word from any of them,” said Recel Villar. “So we do not know where they are now or if they have food and water.”
Villar lamented the fact that almost all media coverage had been from Leyte province’s largest city, Tacloban, which had been devastated by the typhoon. Her family was in a town to the north of Tacloban that has received no media attention at all.
“What about all those other municipalities that are suffering?” Villar said. “Why does nobody seem interested in helping the other places where many have died and there is no food and water?”