A Message from Gressier, Haiti: “This morning the second parking lot baby was born”

by Abe Sauer

There is a lot of advice going around about what people can do to help in Haiti. The conventional advice is don’t give anything except money. This is good advice-unless you have a helicopter. If you have a helicopter or know of someone who has access to a helicopter, perhaps you can do something for one physician, one physician’s assistant and one optometrist cut off from assistance as they operate a makeshift operating room set up in a church in Gressier, about ten miles west of Port-au-Prince.

The trapped medical professionals are with Haiti Health Ministries. They live in the nation year-round providing clinic services for those Haitians with no other care options (which means, basically, everyone). This includes everything from pain management to labor and delivery care to “dental day,” which, as I’ve been told, is the day when they just pull teeth dawn until dusk. Two of those there are a couple with an infant daughter.

Contact with them is intermittent-but is never without the plea for supplies. Just a couple of the messages they have managed to get out:

A little before 5:00 yesterday the roar started. Something like a tornado, except the trees weren’t blowing — they were moving. And so was our truck and the ground and me. My reaction was something like — what was that? Earthquake! I’m glad everything is okay. I’ll put the groceries up now.

About then David ran up shouting “Is everybody okay?” and I realized I should be doing the same. I found Eleanor, she was just across the way and I could see her the whole time. Teresa had gone to the clinic so Dave and I took off running to check on people there. We found the Eye Clinic apartments had collapsed and were still collapsing. Jim and Sandy made it outside, if only barely, and dazed. I found Teresa and we shared a hug and some incredulity. We shouted for Nannie and she appeared from the new HHM building which was in ruins. Then we saw the school.

The high school had folded in half and was still cracking and spewing dust and glass. We ran over and shouted for survivors, but it looked the school had already completely emptied. We found some abandoned sandals, a bicycle thrown to the side in haste and a notebook computer face in the dust with its optical tray extended. Doug and I went back to the school later that night, but it was too dangerous to enter and the rooms looked empty.

I should have seen what was coming next, but for some reason none of us understood that the first injured person that showed up at the gate was just the beginning of steady stream that would continue into today. We gathered supplies from any structure we thought was safe and piled them in the grass parking area. Someone started separating the injured from the merely scared. We found and started a gas generator and powered two large fluorescent floodlights to illuminate our makeshift OR. We started cleaning, suturing and splinting and didn’t stop until 5:30 in the morning when we all lay down under the stars for the briefest of naps. Young and old were injured from head to toe and two dead were delivered to our gate. I held one lady’s head as she delivered at our gate. A little baby boy that Teresa and Amy massaged into life. This morning the second parking lot baby was born at the end of my driveway as we finished cleaning up my house. Teresa had about 10 minutes of sleep and is going full throttle today.

Thanks for all your prayers. People continue to show up, increasingly outside of our limits of care and we will soon run out of supplies. Many have asked how they can help. It would be difficult and daring to try to run to Haiti right now. Houses were not all that collapsed. It appears communications and infrastructure are crippled too. We believe that international relief organizations will appear soon and giving through them may be the best early option. Above all pray for God to hear the cries and answers. He is the only one big enough to hear all the suffering.

And:

i’m ok, and so is Ryan and Nora [Eleanor]. our house sustained damage (cracks, flooding, everything off the shelves) but didn’t fall down. J. and S.’s house (where i used to live) fell down. so did part of the clinic, the eye clinic, and all of the schools. the guesthouse is still standing, as well as our house and David’s house. everyone else lost their house. we worked all night trying to help people, and are still working today. it’s like being in hell… people dying on your doorstep, limbs falling off, gashes and paralysis and everything you’d see in war. all the missionaries here are ok, only a few bumps and bruises as they scrambled to get out of their houses. Ryan and Nora and i were outside when it happened, so we were ok. that’s all the update i can give you for now, because i’ve got to go back to more chaos. thank the Lord E. is here to take care of Nora while Ryan and i work.

Now they are running out of supplies and with Monday’s untreated, non-life-threatening injuries becoming tomorrow’s mortal infections, their work is only starting.

Christian non-profit organization Agape has gathered supplies and has a plane and has agreed to fly to Port-au-Prince with supplies specifically for the makeshift OR in Gressier. But without a helicopter to get the supplies the few more miles from Port to Gressier, the stuff might as well be sitting in Poughkeepsie.

As of now, nobody knows they are there-not the Red Cross, not World Vision, not the incoming U.S. military-only a handful of Haitians and Americans, including the physician assistant’s sister in Minneapolis, who is calling anyone who might be able to help.

So: can you help? Probably not. But if you know anyone who knows anyone who might be able to help, please do what you can-and drop us a line.

Grindr: the iPhone app that is the future of insane, GPS-locating gay cruising? Or the scariest gay bar on earth that is all over the earth? Only America’s best Tumblr, Guys I Blocked On Grindr, can tell you (that the answer is the latter most likely).

Science has determined how to brag successfully: “[T]o pull off a successful boast, you need it to be appropriate to the conversation. If your friend, colleague, or date raises the topic, you can go ahead and pull a relevant boast in safety. Alternatively, if you’re forced to turn the conversation onto the required topic then you must succeed in provoking a question from your conversation partner. If there’s no question and you raised the topic then any boast you make will leave you looking like a big-head.” Okay! I mean, didn’t we know that already? Oh, you didn’t? Well, no big deal. I’m glad that we’ve got Science on the case to help us all learn. What? Oh, well, I guess I just knew it intuitively, but I’m kind of lucky that way in that I have a good sense of how to have a conversation with really smart people like yourself. [Via]

GLAAD, an organization that began with the best of intentions and is now, in my opinion, the gay world’s biggest fundraising non-profit disaster-with donation income of more than $12 million in 2008, and, for some reason, on-hand assets of more than $11 million at the end of that year, and with staff of at least 46, none of whom, in my experience, are remotely able to return phone calls in a timely fashion to a reporter on deadline-announced its Media Awards this week. Actually the most amazing thing about their announcement about the state of media is that it includes three media contacts: one in-house and also two out-sourced PR people at pricey PR shop BWR, one in LA and one in New York. Why can’t a media organization handle the media? Anyway: and their nominees are….

1. Mad Men. The historical television show with the sad sack closeted gay guy who only has sex with guys when he’s drunk and whose character only revolves around his gayness, to the point where New York mag asked the actor: “Do you think you’ll get a story line not related to Sal being gay at some point soon?” To which he replied: “I would love that.” Don’t hold your breath pal!

2. Tom Ford’s A Single Man. The historical movie about the sad sack closeted gay guy who spends the movie trying to kill himself.

3. Everything else that had a gay character. From RuPaul’s Drag Race to Glee to One Life to Live to Lady Gaga herself, if you had some gay in you, you are nominated for an award. Because there is a big party. To which these nominees come.

Stay tuned for next year, when the revival of Boys in the Band gets nominated. Since GLAAD hosted a screening of the film version-what they consider a “cultural touchstone that still resonates today”-just last year.

The great and bearded NBA star Baron Davis hooks up an endorsement deal with Chinese sneaker company Li-Ning and ends up making a pretty terrific rap video. Watch the Clippers point guard bop and dribble city streets, playing ball with passersby to the strains of “Make It Fast”-a definitely def jam the dearly departed Detroit producer Jay Dilla cooked up from David Essex’ old classic-rock nugget, “Rock On.” Underground L.A. MC Diz Gibran supplies the rhymes, hip-hop luminaries DJ Clue, Irv Gotti, Jim Jones and Common make quick cameos (Where’s The Game? Davis is godfather to his son!) but the real star of the show is the setting, the city, New York. Awfully hard not to love.

Understatement of the day: “Repossession law in California is not consumer-friendly.” [Via]

The Great Las Vegas Monorail Fail

“The Las Vegas Monorail Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday.” Oh noes, why? It has only been in business since 2004! “Because the train’s popularity was overestimated, the company has not paid off the $650 million in construction and start-up costs…. Monorail representatives told the state they anticipated about 20 million passengers a year who would pay a fee of $2.50 per trip. The monorail’s Web site says it has carried 27 million passengers in five years.” MONORAIL!

Sarah Palin Makes Us Cringe

Honestly, at this point it is just getting cruel.

Crazy stuff out of Guatemala, where a UN commission has concluded that Rodrigo Rosenberg, a lawyer whose posthumously released video blaming his murder on leftist president Alvaro Colom electrified the country last May, actually hired the assassins himself in a bid to destabilize the administration. This is one of those murky situations where things will probably never be 100% certain, but it is still pretty amazing.

Janet Maslin pans Joshua Ferris’ new novel The Unnamed in the Times today, citing “authorial overkill” and “writerly preciousness” as reasons. She lost authority on the subject, however, in her very first sentence, when she dismissed Ferris’ first book, Then We Came To the End, as “charming but weightless.” That makes me think she may not have read Then We Came To the End very closely. Or at least not closely enough in the beautiful and powerful central chapter, where we follow a lonely, career-minded advertising executive facing a diagnosis of breast cancer with the support of her commitment-averse boyfriend-who breaks up with her a few days before surgery.

“I’m just being honest here. I am totally committed to seeing you through this. But as a friend,” he said. “Only as a friend.”

Weightless? Jesus, how strong is Janet Maslin? Is she having The Hulk write reviews for her? If so, The Hulk exhibits his own authorial overkill and writerly preciousness, overexerting to work in unnecessary wordplay: “The Unnamed is a literal Ferris wheel for the reader, since it brings Tim through ups and downs so cyclical they make the book seem to be going nowhere.”

That no sound like Hulk.