AN ERRAND OF MERCY

Exhausted rescue workers cheer as a child is found alive under tons of rubble.

Thousands of suddenly homeless people erect a crude tent city on the grounds of their former capital.

The sick and injured pack into makeshift medical clinics.

These are images broadcast worldwide in the wake of a devastating earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Since the quake struck on Jan. 12, an estimated 200,000 people or more are dead and the Haitian government has collapsed nearly as quickly as its main city.

These are also the images that greet Dr. Jordan Greer every morning. An emergency room physician at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, Greer and his sons Jordan II, 21, and Hunter, 19, have been in Port-au-Prince for the past week spending long hours treating those physically devastated by the earthquake.

The decision to travel from Alaska to Haiti was an easy one, Dr. Greer said. After hearing about the disaster it took him “about 30 seconds” to decide he needed to be there.

It’s 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning in Port-au-Prince and the Greers are already awake and gearing up to go out into the city and open their clinic again. They are treating upwards of 200 people a day, but the need is far greater than they can provide themselves, Dr. Greer said.

“Back in the ’80s when I first started practicing (medicine), I was practicing in Florida and I used to go down (to Haiti) and do medical missions,” he said. “I realized what Haiti was like before they ever had a disaster, which was basically a disaster to begin with.”

With his experience providing medical services in Haiti, Dr. Greer knew the need would be beyond anything he’s dealt with before.

“I know the only chance these people have is if there’s a massive effort to help them through this,” he said.

For those who can only see the destruction caused by the earthquake on television, Dr. Greer tries to describe the carnage.

“Imagine Anchorage if there were only about a dozen buildings remaining standing up and the rest had collapsed like pancakes on the people inside,” he said. “Only multiply that by 10 or 100 or whatever the population (difference) is.”

The Greers are staying in an orphanage near one of the city’s hospitals and their medical gear is guarded by men with guns. In the 10 days since the earthquake, the city’s population has taken refuge wherever it can, Dr. Greer said.

“It’s a lot of tent cities right now,” he said. “People are unwilling, and probably wisely so, to go back into the buildings. They take any sheets they could grab and went out setting up tents all connected to each other. There are thousands of people on a soccer field, or thousands of people in a park, or thousands of people along the beach. They set up and live more communally hoping somebody will bring them some water.”

The relief the Greers bring may be small in comparison to the overall need, but that doesn’t discourage them, he said.

“We go out to these camps and we set up a clinic,” Dr. Greer said. “We look around and get other people to help us find out who’s hurt and who can’t move. If we can clean up their wounds we do, if they have some infections, we give them antibiotics, if there are no infections we give them a bar of soap and ask them to share it with their neighbors so we can wash out those wounds. We’re still seeing wounds that have not even been washed out yet.”

It’s 1:30 p.m. Friday and Sallie Greer has been on the go since 4 a.m. With her husband and two sons in Haiti, she spends about 19 hours a day organizing shipments of medicines and supplies to their relief effort.

So far, all the supplies the Greers are using in Haiti have been donated by Mat-Su Regional Medical Center and other Valley physicians, she said. The medicines have so far been out-of-pocket for her family. Along with travel for her husband and sons, she estimates the humanitarian effort has cost the Greers about $10,000 in the past six days.

That her husband would want to be on the front lines of the relief effort isn’t surprising, Sallie Greer said.

“He’s been to Haiti before and he’s been telling me for a number of years he wanted to do some sort of humanitarian medicine,” she said. “Then this came up. He was at work on Wednesday (the day after the quake), he called me and said, ‘I’ve got two and a half weeks off. Starting on Friday we’re on vacation. What would you think if we canceled the vacation plans and I went to Haiti instead?’”

Her oldest son, Jordan II, is a pre-med student at the University of Alaska Anchorage and had to withdraw from school for the semester to make the trip, she said. While one of his professors was willing to allow him to make up his class work when he returned, another was not. Rather than risk getting a low grade and jeopardizing his chances to get into medical school, he’s taking the semester off.

Hunter is a high school student in the Valley.

When asked about what emotions she has as a wife and mother knowing where her family is, her eyes tear up a little.

“Of course, I’m very proud of them,” she said. “But, there are very mixed emotions. I was very afraid for their safety in the beginning, but they are down there now and they assure me (reported violence) is not as sensational as the news makes it seem.

“It makes me really proud of them, and I think it’s an incredible experience for them to be able to share with each other. I’m certain it will be a life-altering experience for my sons.”

While her husband and sons treat hundreds of injured Haitians each day, Sallie Greer said her job is to make sure they can stay there as long as possible. In addition to coordinating the daily medical shipments, she’s also holding a fund-raiser brunch and silent auction today at Turkey Red. The success of the fund-raiser will help determine how long they can continue their work.

“That depends on how much money we’re able to raise,” she said. If successful, they can stay until Feb. 15; if not, they’ll return Jan. 30.

In addition to the physical devastation, the Jan. 12 earthquake has also destroyed the country’s leadership, Dr. Greer said.

“A lot of the leadership of the country is in chaos,” he said. The quake “has blocked the roads, which were bad to start with. There’s no communications, which was bad to start with. Sanitation is nonexistent.”

When assessing the situation, Edmond Mulet, who’s leading United Nations efforts in Haiti, told The New York Times it’s unlikely the final human toll may never be known.

“I don’t think we will ever know what the death toll is from this earthquake,” he told The Times. “People are burying bodies by themselves, many more have been thrown into dumps outside the city and an untold number sill lie under the rubble.”

It’s 6:40 a.m. Saturday, and Dr. Greer has to cut his telephone interview short. He as work to do.

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.