Newsmaker Q&A: Dr. Maribel Garcia Zaragoza

Dr. Maribel Garcia Zaragoza, co-pastor of the Maranatha Christian Church in Dover, and her son, Ennio Emmanuel, traveled to Haiti from Jan. 24 to Jan. 31 to assist with medical care in ongoing relief efforts.

As someone who works for Delmarva Rural Ministries, a non-profit that provides assistance to underserved populations, and who has volunteered for more than nine years to go on global medical trips, she’s familiar with relief efforts. However, this time, she said she felt bad about leaving because there’s still so much to be done.

Q: Why did you think it was important to assist with relief efforts in Haiti?
A: This opportunity was simply thrown upon us and we took a hold of it because we felt it was our duty to respond. We had the means to bring medicine, medical care and most importantly, love, to the country of Haiti so how could we resist the request to go?

Assisting others in regards to medicine is one of our family’ main objectives, not only in Haiti, but also around the world. We have more than nine years of experience when it comes to medical trips to different countries. We have been to now Haiti as well as Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and several other countries in South America with the hope of going to Africa as well.

Going to Haiti impacted our lives in a huge way and we are currently working on building a campground safe haven for Haitians that will provide food, medical care, evangelism for those lost spiritually and also shelter for children who are currently without parents or legal guardians due to the earthquake.

Q: What was the make-up of the group that traveled to Haiti?
A: The trip that we went on was just my son and I. My son, 22, also has been traveling on these trips with our family for more than nine years. We brought a large amount of medical care, equipment, medicine, food and hygiene products to give as donations when we arrived to our main site in Haiti.

Q: What did you do to help and what was your experience like?
A: We arrived in Dominican Republic and connected with our friend Luis, who is still there working on building the orphanages and medical campgrounds.
We soon found that our plans to work as a team of two with some help from other natives would have to be postponed until we had a team of 15 or more because the work was too much for two to handle.

We quickly assembled our belongings and connected with a group of other volunteer doctors and nurses that had recently arrived to Haiti. The nurses were from Memphis, Tenn., and they were students at Union University who were currently studying to be nurse practitioners.

As a certified doctor, I was ultimately in charge and had to direct my group to complete our mission once we got to the site. We didn’t know what we were getting into but were determined to do whatever we had to do to get the job done.

Q: Describe a typical day during the days you were down there?
A: When we first arrived to our job site there were several groups of about seven people each and we all had to work in different areas to take care of patients who had just been delivered from surgery. There were different areas such as a tent with patients, severe trauma areas that were being run by the Dominican Republic medical personnel and our site, the Orphanage.

This building was actually a building that was going to be an actual orphanage, but became a hospital that would house hundreds of patients that were in critical need of care or who had just gotten out of surgery.

As the teams assembled they quickly yelled for a team to take the night shift, they said it was hard but that they desperately needed a team to do it … and I presented my team as the team to handle the night hours. We quickly left and went to bed, which we found would be nearly impossible to do during the day with so much noise going on and us sleeping on the floor of a house that had no windows and just a small mattress for us to lay on without any real covering. We also had no showers or any clean running water so our first day was a true test of who could endure and who could not.

Each day we would start the day at around 5:30 p.m. and get signed in and go to our site. We would begin the shift with looking at all the client files and seeing what the previous shift had mentioned about each patient. When we first arrived it seemed that our team was the only team with any real sense of organization because the charts for each patient were a total mess. I began to assist the nurses in creating a chart organization that would be easy to understand for everyone and also consistent with every section of the hospital area. When I arrived I was put in charge of the whole “Orphanage” hospital and on top of that, I had to be the main doctor for the emergency room.

We quickly learned how the flow would work with our group and our team meshed better than I could have ever hoped. We encountered near death experiences with our patients during our night shifts, children screaming in pain, patients who would be admitted at wee hours of the night who needed care and most of all we had to be emotional pillars of strength for the people.

We encountered a mother who had lost five of her six kids and her husband in the earthquakes and even children who had lost their parents who had nowhere else to go and had taken a bus to this hospital. We couldn’t reject them just because they had no real sickness; their sickness was the lonesomeness they felt inside but that they hid with a smile that they kept on their face at all times. It was heartbreaking.

After our shift, which would end at around 8 a.m., we would go to our rest areas and try to rest. This task would be very hard sometimes because we were all sleeping on floors and we would have people working outside, hammering and such, as well as workers who would be coming in and out of their shifts. It was a very difficult experience to only get three hours of good sleep and then have to tend for hundreds of patients.

There were many people at the hospital that asked our team not to leave and said we should stay but our responsibilities in the United States brought us back.

Q: Many Americans have read about or seen news coverage from the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake, what was different about being there in person and were you surprised or shocked about anything you saw?

A: Well the pain we saw and heard is deeper than we could ever see or hear on TV here in the United States. To hear the real life stories of individuals and to see the hope in their eyes for a new tomorrow is like gold to me. I could not express to you the feeling I felt to connect with the Haitian people.

The tragedy is a lot worse in person. You hear of the main capital being destroyed but you don’t hear how the suburb cities also have been hit but are receiving little medical care, food, or water. This is something that needs to be brought to light because with the millions of dollars being spent many areas are still not getting help. Big organizations come in and drop off stuff but don’t disperse it in an organized manner and if their donations get in the wrong hands the donations will never get to some of the people who are in need.

The worst for myself and for my son was to leave.

I feel that what you don’t see on TV is all of the volunteers that are volunteering their time. People are spending their life savings to help the Haitians, but they are doing it on their own, without the need of the big nonprofits. Some might say these people are wasting their money but that is not true because there are little medical clinics here and there that need X-Ray machines, medicines and other urgent medical care instruments that can be bought quickly with a couple thousand dollars instead of waiting for help to come from a larger organization.

Q: You were there nearly two weeks after the earthquake. Did it seem like a lot had already been accomplished in the way of relief efforts and how much more needed to be done?
A: There is a lot more to be done. Not only is there still intense medical care needed, there is also so much rebuilding of structures, workforce, life, and social aspects needed in Haiti that the need can sometimes become overwhelming.

I believe a leader needs to stand and take the initiative to lead Haiti to a better tomorrow but I do not feel that we have seen that yet. Haiti has really started at ground zero, as my son would tell you, “Cave man status.” The organizations are helping but no one has stepped in to begin the new Haiti yet, they are just doing what they did before — arrive, give, leave.

After nine years of traveling the world and bringing help to those in need, my son and I, for the first time, felt weird when we got back to the United States. We had never felt this way before but this emotion came over us on the plane home that we had to do something. We broke into tears on the plane, surprisingly to us because we had not shed a tear while in Haiti.

Q: Was there any particular moment or memory that you know will stay with you?
A: This whole trip in reality will stay with me. The fact that I quickly became the director of so many patients and how quickly our team assembled and organized the hospital to a point where when we left we knew that it was left in a whole lot better condition than when we arrived makes me know that I was there for a purpose.

I believe God sent me there to work very hard to fix the organizational mistakes that occurred. This experience changed my son’s life in such a big way that he is currently looking into medical schools for the year 2011.

Once again, I mention that we have been doing this for more than nine years, but Haiti was unlike any other place we had been too. A moment my son will forever remember is our last night. Not only did we receive two new orphan boys whose parents had died in the earthquake but we also received a girl named, Beatrice, who had been in what we called the tent cities — shelters made of mere blankets or trash bags where people would sleep outside because of lack of space or because of fear of being in a building.

This girl was found and brought to the emergency room. That night we found this girl who had been hit in the head so hard during the earthquake she received severe brain damage and one of her eyes had become unresponsive and her jaw also was broken. This girl had not eaten anything nor could she walk because she was seeing double. We found her and could not believe that a medical team could just not remember to care for her, but these were things that we encountered many times while working in the hospital.

We quickly tried to feed her milk, but the milk would just flow out of her mouth because she could not really move her jaw at all because it was broken. This tormented my son because she was a sweet young girl and although she was in so much pain and needed so much need, there was little we could do for her to eat. We continued to serve her milk and she did get to have some of what we served but it was still ridiculous for some doctors to not tend to patients with the same care as they would with patients in the States or any hospital around the world.

One of the main things I would say that I personally did with the Haitian patients that I noticed many doctors did not, is that I treated them with the same care as I would with patients in the states. If anyone goes to Haiti to volunteer, they must have this mindset because these people need so much care that if we give them anything less than our best work they will suffer.

I was blessed to be given the energy to endure this. At 50 years old some would say I am crazy to go on such a trip but I urge everyone and anyone to continue to seek to assist the needs of others, because that is our true purpose in life — to help others.

Q: As someone who works for Delmarva Rural Ministries, a non-profit that provides assistance to underserved populations, what was the difference between your work there and what you experienced in Haiti?
A: At Delmarva I encounter many patients who are in dire need of help. I know that the patients at Delmarva already have an advantage because most of them have a home to go too but some do lack important means to live a comfortable life. Over all, the needs are far more extreme in Haiti but for me the patients were the same in my heart.

I fell in love with my patients in Haiti with the same love I treat my patients with here in Dover, Delaware. I have prided myself in working with each patients with the utmost care and although I may have encountered some issues in Haiti that I truly did not know every answer too, I promise you that with my son with his iphone and Google and the amazing team I had placed under me in Haiti, we were able to leave Haiti with the promise of returning and I cannot wait to go back.

Anyone can donate to fund for Haiti by mailing a check or money order to Dream4Haiti, Maranatha, 1447 S. Governors, Ave, Dover, DE 19904. A receipt can be sent in return for a non-profit donation to the address listed on the donation information.
For other inquires, email ennioemmanuel@gmail.com.

Email Jayne Gest at jayne.gest@doverpost.com.