The struggle to get relief through to Haiti has not stopping the efforts of several New York-based doctors to bring aid to their home country.
“I’ve been serving the Haitian community for over 25 years at my office in Flatbush. It’s time to give back something to them,” said Dr. Kesler Dalmacy, a family practitioner whose ad hoc group of 10 doctors and nurses is planning to go “as soon as possible.”
The phone at the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad’s New York chapter on Eastern Parkway is flooded with doctors volunteering to go. Roughly 50 New York doctors and 20 from other states have signed up, said Dr. Joseph Pierre-Paul Cadet, vice president of the organization.
“The problem we are facing is logistics,” Cadet said. “It’s total devastation.”
One group left Thursday morning, another was stranded that afternoon when Haiti shut down its airport. Cadet was trying to get them into the Dominican Republic.
“Each of us knows someone who was hurt in this disaster,” Cadet said.
Dalmacy — who returns to Haiti every two months to run a mobile clinic outside of Port-au-Prince — hosted a fundraising event Wednesday night where person after person arose to recite the names of deceased or missing relatives.
“There are so many bodies, so many collapsed houses,” he said.
