The following is the second of many field reports that will be sent from our Haiti field reporter Kirk Noonan.
Gamaelle, 10, wears a crisp, white dress. She is a pretty girl even with swollen, bloodshot eyes. A soiled dressing covers her head. A makeshift splint runs up and down her left leg. She is missing teeth. Bruises, scrapes, gashes and bumps cover most of her body.
The injuries happened after the earthquake.
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Today, under a tree in a courtyard at a church a team of health professionals from Mission of Hope, a Convoy of Hope partner, will try to set her leg, which has breaks in the tibia and fibula.
As the team prepares the leg to be set Gamaelle screams and moans in pain.
“Don’t touch my leg there,” she cries. “God you forgot me!”
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When the earthquake struck, Gamaelle was in her house. She had just finished doing her homework and had sat down to rest after a long day of school. When the earthquake hit, her home started to crumble. She ran out of the house seemingly to safety.
“She made it outside, but the house next to ours fell on her,” says Pere Gary, her father. “She was buried under the rubble for more than an hour, but we knew she was alive because she kept saying, ‘I’m here, I’m alive.’ “
As the medical team attends to Gamaelle she pleads with them over and over. Even with pain medication she screams, “No, no, no, no!”
Her father hovers over her assuring everything is going to be okay. But it is no use. She is too afraid, too scared and in too much pain.
“We’re going to try to set the leg,” says Gary Higgins, international project director for Convoy of Hope and a trained paramedic, who was one of the team members assisting Gamaelle. “But even if we can set the leg, she will still need surgery.”
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The future is bleak for Gamaelle and her family.
Pere Gary and his wife have eight children in all. Food and water are scarce. Though their house was not flattened like so many others, he says, it was completely destroyed.
Tonight, like they have done since the earthquake struck, the family will sleep on the streets.
No place for a little girl with a broken leg.
