Dr. Andy Hoang of Los Angeles examines a woman with a grossly decayed crown in Port-a-Piment, Haiti, on Thursday. The dentist, who is traveling with a group of relief workers that includes four Wyoming women, extracted what was left of the tooth. (Joshua Wolfson/Star-Tribune)
PORT-A-PIMENT, Haiti — Most of the time, they only have a few minutes. The clinic line is already long, and more people will arrive throughout the day. With hundreds of people waiting to be examined, the comparatively few medical volunteers in Haiti must be quick with their examinations.
They must also be flexible. Medical supplies are limited, and the best drug to treat an illness might not be the one that is available.”We can’t do definitive care,” said Laurie Johnson, a physician’s assistant with Wyoming Haiti Relief who’s made 15 trips here.
Time and supply constraints are constant challenges. They force relief workers to find the best feasible solution, even if it isn’t always ideal.Dentist Andy Hoang knows this well. He’s been in Haiti doing relief work with a group that also includes volunteers from the Wyoming Haiti Relief organization. Hoang has spent days pulling teeth that would have been easy to save if the patients had been in a modern dentist’s office. “Here, you just have to do with what you have,” he said.
Poor residents can’t pay local dentists for fillings. So they rely on more drastic solutions to ease their pain Most of them are like, ‘Doctor, take [the tooth] out,'” said Hoang, who estimated he’s performed extractions on 85 percent of the patients he’s treated in Haiti. Sometimes, even simple supplies are unavailable. At a clinic this week in Les Cayes, Paula Egan-Wright, a French and Haitian Creole translator with Wyoming Haiti Relief, was helping a woman suffering heat exhaustion “Is there anything you can get wet?” she asked another volunteer, hoping to cool the patient.But the faucets didn’t work. Eventually, a volunteer used his own limited supply of water. Johnson, who is leading the Wyoming team, encountered an 11-year-old girl with asthma on Thursday. The child needed an inhaler, but one wasn’t around. “So we gave her a dose of [a steroid] and hope for the best,” she said.
