Medical mission team sees resilient spirits in spite of devastation in Haiti

The airport at Port-au-Prince looked the way Dr. Medhat Allam imagined a war zone would.

When he and 16 other medical practitioners, many from Southampton Hospital, arrived there by plane at around 1 a.m. on January 24 for what would be a weeklong emergency medical mission, the capital city had all but collapsed on itself after the devastating earthquake that struck just a week before. Standing in the dark, surrounded by 3,000 pounds of medical supplies, the noise of the U.S. military activity was deafening, Dr. Allam said this week. Members of the Air Force and Marines were patrolling with machine guns and standing alongside tanks in a scene of organized chaos—the kind that would mark much of the rest of their trip.

The group was in Haiti on a rushed trip organized by International Surgical Medical Support, a Southampton-based nonprofit co-founded by Dr. Allam that sends fully equipped medical teams to impoverished countries to perform surgeries at no charge to patients. Before leaving for Haiti on January 23, Dr. Allam had said his team would be successful because they were prepared for anything.

Immediately upon arriving in the country, Haiti’s collapsed infrastructure put that claim to the test.

To read the entire article, pick up the the Feb 4 issue of The Southampton Press.