Carol Smith, left, and Mandi McBride sit with a group of children from the Ruuska Village orphanage near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, prior to last week's earthquake. (photo courtesy Carol Smith)
By Matthew K. Jensen
Published: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 2:36 AM CST
For years Carol Smith declined the offer to visit Haiti with a friend who wanted to show her the place where she had been more than a dozen times to adopt two children.
After finally agreeing to a 10-day trip, Smith stepped off an American Airlines jet and onto Haitian soil just 30 hours before the earthquake that shook the small country into the world spotlight.
Smith, 57, was with fellow registered nurse and close friend Mandi McBride, who adopted two Haitian children in 2008. Smith of Nibley and McBride of Mt. Sterling were on a mission to provide medical care in a small orphanage about seven miles from Port-au-Prince.
“She’d begged me to go for four years,” said Smith. “She always wanted me to go and see where her kids came from.”
The two were staying in Ruuska Village, which houses about 30 children who are waiting for visas and final adoption paper work. The orphanage is equipped with a small medical clinic, clean water and generators for electricity.
“They have so many little children there and they just need people to help,” she said. “We were there to help out medically and emotionally in any way we could.”
After managing to board a medevac jet in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, the two flew to the Dominican Republic, Florida and eventually to Salt Lake City, where they arrived Monday morning with a story neither will soon forget.
“We had been giving out new shoes to everybody the day before the earthquake,” said Smith. “We had just finished up with that and we were pretty tired and went back to the little hut we were in, but decided we should go back and feed the babies.”
Smith said she was walking up an outside staircase to reach the children on the orphanage’s second floor when she felt the shaking start.
“I was standing out on the ledge, holding onto a rail as it started. It was an explosion of noise. The movement was incredible, and when I was up that high I saw buildings collapse and heard Mandi scream as she flew into the room where babies were just flying all over. Things started shaking and breaking. I looked over and the next building just went flat to the ground.”
Smith said she remembered thinking at the moment that she was going to die.
“I thought if this doesn’t stop, I’m gone,” she said. “It was the closest I’ve ever been to thinking I wasn’t going to make it.”
The two women grabbed the infants from the room and ran them downstairs to an open area outside. Dozens of smaller tremors followed the initial magnitude 7.0 quake that devastated much of the country’s capital.
“The first three or four hours after the earthquake, it never stopped and the aftershocks weren’t just little,” she said. “Everyone was panicking.”
Smith said she was astonished to watch and listen as the Haitian people sang and chanted into the night — a way of coping with the disaster.
“They chanted and sang and danced all night long,” she said. “And hearing the babies scream all night long was really awful.”
Subsequent shaking toppled parts of the tall walls that surround Ruuska Village. Smith said about 75 percent of the orphanage was damaged, but miraculously none of the children were seriously injured.
“Not a soul was injured there, but in the homes next door, we saw them totally collapse.”
The night hours that followed and the days before the two Cache Valley women returned home were full of service and caring for the sick and injured.
“Word spread really quickly that there were nurses there,” she said. “Every single day someone came in with an illness. We just tried to triage them and stabilize them. One girl stopped by with an open fractured leg and another girl with a face that was just massacred. There wasn’t a lot we could do so we just kept it clean.”
The two had basic medical supplies including antibodies and splints. They stitched up lacerations and used every bit of their years of medical experience to help those in need. On Saturday the two traveled back to Port-au-Prince, where they assisted with more severe medical cases on the grounds of the U.S. embassy.
“We worked real hard,” said Smith. “We got to help with some incredibly severe cases for about four hours. The whole time we were able to use a lot of medical skills. We probably didn’t stay in the realm of what we should do but we did what we could do.”
Smith and McBride were originally scheduled to leave Tuesday but managed to get out earlier after standing in line for eight hours to get off the island on a chartered U.S. military flight to the Dominican Republic. She said the Port-au-Prince airport runway was not in bad condition but that a swarm of airborne aid made logistics at the tiny airport messy.
“All these smaller planes were bringing in product and staying long enough that it didn’t give anyone room to land,” she said. “As we stood in line for all those hours they turned away many, many people. It was sad.”
As the women departed in the aircraft, Smith said she looked out and could see the vast differences between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“I don’t think words can describe the situation that Haiti is in or that it was in prior to this happening,” she said. “I’m grateful and thankful that I could do what I was able to do, but I’m also thankful to be alive and be back here. I hope and pray that this will make me into a better person and maybe make a lot of us think about how lucky we are.”
Smith credited McBride for her determination in planning to go back to Haiti soon.
“She is a tough, tough girl,” said Smith. “She’s probably one of the most incredible people I’ve ever been around.”
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