Helping Haiti

The Transformational Development Agency team is home. They flew via Continental Airlines to LAX, where they landed at 11 a.m. Saturday. Some were met by their families. Others rode a bus to the Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village, where they were met by friends and loved ones. 

The Transformational Development Agency team out of Ventura County has just boarded a plane in Haiti and the group is on its way to Palm Beach, Florida, where they will spend the night. They will board a plane in the morning for California.

On Thursday a four-year-old boy arrived, having had no food or water for three or four days. He also appears to be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Above is Dave De Vos, who is part of the Ventura County TDA team.

The Haitian baby with head injuries, which the TDA team calls "Baby Jerry" has apparently pulled through, according to Brian Field, who is with the Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village.

Thousand Oaks neurosurgeon Ian Armstrong joined the team after reading about the Haiti relief effort in the Star. Armstrong Thursday developed an neurological intensive care process for paralyzed patients.

The 40-strong group launched three teams Thursday. One went to a Port-au-Prince orphanage. The second went to the medical tent hospital set up by the University of Miami, which is near the airport. 

The third went to an orphanage called Maison de Lumiere (House of Light) to build shelves which will hold medication.

The TDA group from Ventura County is encamped in an orphanage near the airport called the New Life Children's Home. It is now a care ward for amputees and other patients needing long term care.

The TDA team is scheduled to leave Haiti and fly back to Ventura County Saturday, with plans to send more relief teams to Haiti through the year.

Scott Mortensen is exhausted. The TDA volunteer from Woodland Hills said it is not because he is overworked or underfed, but because he is trying to keep up with Dave Perlmutter, a 79-year-old retired physician from Agoura who, after working nonstop for hours, walked over to a hose and took a full shower, scrubs and all.

Mortensen, a firefighter, EMT and filmmaker, said he's also impressed with Thousand Oaks neurosurgeon Ian Armstrong. Armstrong, he said, has humble beginnings in Bakersfield, and decided to come because he wants to be an example to his kids.

"It's one thing to tell them to be good people," Armstrong said. "it's quite another to demonstrate through action, not words."

Mortensen spoke about a place called Mr. Bill's Orphanage, which is having trouble with people desperate for food.

"About 20 bandits looking to steal supplies had to be quelled," Mortensen said. "At least one shot was fired by a policeman who lived near the orphanage, but thankfully it was into the air."

Brian Field, who is managing the team of about 20 from Calvary Community Church, asked ex-Marine Bobby Martin, also of Calvary, to build some shelves for Mr. Bill's as the bandits destroyed a wall.

Mortensen said the baby with the skull fracture known only as "Jerry" still may not make it, so the group is praying. The doctors on the TDA team have treated hundreds during the week they've been in Haiti. Most recently, they treated a man with a compound fracture to his leg and a 15-year-old with severe chemical burns.

"The people here do not complain because they are accustomed to no one listening," Mortensen said. "So they do what they can with what they've got."

 

Here, TDA team leader Rikki Alakija speaks as he shoots video of medical efforts under a tent clinic set up in an area that had not received any help since the earthquake.

TDA team members Natasha Nelson and David de Vos talk about how they spent Wednesday.

Volunteers with the Transformational Development Team continue to travel through rubble-strewn Port-au-Prince, often having to cover their faces to combat the smell of decomposing bodies. 

Below is TDA team member Kerry Lewis, a Redding, Ca. disaster relief nurse.

An exhausted medical team was just about to go back to camp Tuesday night when Santa Monica emergency room doctor Jolie Pfahler noticed that a baby named Jerry with a possible skull fracture had gotten listless and unresponsive.

She quickly assembled a group of surgeons who tended to him and took him into the makeshift operating room.

"Tonight we prayed for the young life of Jerry," said Brian Field, who a member of the Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village. "He would not have made it through the night had our team not returned to check on him.

Field is referring to a makeshift clinic the team set up in an abandoned motel in Port-au-Prince.

Field also spoke of a young Haitian lawyer named Frantz, who is the oldest of seven children raised by a single mother in one of the poorer sections of Port-au-Prince.

"Frantz narrowly escaped death when the building he had just left, five minutes before the quake, collapsed," Field said.

His mother was among 40 who lost their lives in the quake when the church where they had gone to worship collapsed.

 "We are bonded as a team and will brave the noise from the jets and helicopters another night to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again," Field said. 

Filmmaker David DeVos shares his thoughts. He is among the volunteers who are linked to Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village.

Video of the injured being transported is available on the Transformational Development Agency web site: In the middle of the tragedy, children pose with a TDA volunteer. Here's a doctor from Ventura County wrapping a young boys' hand:

The Transformational Development Agency team has moved into Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the quake. The team, which left from Westlake Village Jan 24, is now setting up makeshift medical clinics around the city.

"They realized people were stuck in areas with no transportation," explained Ayoade Olatunbosun-Alakija, who founded the TDA.  "Availability is one thing. Accessibility is another."

These photos, shot from team members cell phones, are of the medical clinic the team set up inside New Life Children's Home, an orphanage run by a Florida charity.

The team, which includes about 20 members of the Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village, includes several physicians, including Jolie Pfahler, a doctor from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.

"One boy I saw yesterday had a serious gash on the back of his head that was getting badly infected and needed immediate attention," Pfahler said.

In many cases, dead bodies remain below crushed buildings, but there is no way to get them out yet.

Olatunbosun-Alakija said she is already putting together another team that she plans to send in a couple of weeks.

"We need medication and people who know how to administer it," she said.