It may have been a trip to the Caribbean but it was definitely no vacation when Prince George part-time paramedic Michelle Yeager spent two weeks in Haiti last month helping to get victims of a massive cholera outbreak back on their feet.
For 14 hours a night, Yeager, a 48-year-old mother of four, monitored the intravenous lines used to hydrate those who passed through the cholera treatment centre at Cite Soleil, a slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
Yeager returned home on Jan. 26 a little worse for wear as she came down an unspecified ailment she eventually recovered from with some rest and recuperation but also full of stories about the courage of the people facing dire circumstances.
"It was really intense," she said. "The people of Haiti are fantastic, resilient, joyful which was nice because facing the day-to-day grind just to live, I'm not sure that we would be the same. I know I wouldn't."
Hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake a bit more than a year ago, the country suffered a cholera outbreak in late October. Cholera is a bacterial infection, usually contracted through contaminated food or water, and causes diarrhea so intense victims can actually die of dehydration.
Yeager volunteered to help out after her sister, a doctor living in Ontario, sent her an e-mail from Samaritan's Purse. Best known for its Operation Christmas Child program, in which school children send shoe boxes of small gifts to less-fortunate counterparts in other countries, Samaritan's Purse also has a medical wing.
By the time Yeager had arrived, a centre large enough to accommodate 200 people was treating between 70 and 80 at a time and by the time she had left, the number was down to 30 to 40.
It meant the volunteers could concentrate on teaching local medical people how to best treat such victims and Yeager took to using a practice arm made out of diapers rolled up and wrapped in gloving material.
About 40 per cent were children and most stayed about three days. But the more severe cases stayed a week went through as much as 80 litres of fluid by the end of their stay. "We'd be putting in [fluid] desperately fast and they'd be laying on the cholera cots, which had a hole with a bucket underneath, and you could hear it pouring out a litre at a time."
The volunteers got a day off after six days of work but rarely ventured off the compound.
"There was a really violent night one night where you could hear the gunshots and the other sounds accompanying that - people being wounded - but then the same night the people very close to the compound decided to have an all-night prayer singing," Yeager said.
"You could hear the drums and the hymns and the Haitians rock it out, they like to dance and they sing. It was great because at first we thought it was somebody getting wound up to do something bad and then we realized it was praise music, it was pretty sweet."
The only side trip they took was to an old quarry turned into a mass burial site in which Yeager said between 100,000 and 200,000 people were buried following the earthquake to prevent the spread of disease.
"They planted hundreds of small black crosses in this quarry rock and it was powerful and disturbing and sad," she said.
It was anything but a holiday at an all inclusive but Yeager said she'd do it again because it was so rewarding.
"Everyone stepped up their game," she said. "When you first go in you think 'oh, I'm such a pretender, I'm really not what they need' and then everyone becomes what's needed."
