Letter from Pathfinder Academy: Thanks to all who helped!

Common Ground Program

PO Box 2487

Kitale 30200

18^th June 2010

Dear Karen,

RE: COMPLETION OF THE GROUND FLOOR.

On behalf of Common Ground Program and Pathfinder Academy fraternity, may I sincerely thank you for the all effort that you have put in place to ensure that the infrastructure at Pathfinder Academy is improved. This demands denial and self sacrifice on your part.

The ground floor of the building is now complete- hosting a library and six seven classrooms, which are all in use. The library is easily accessed by all students and the staff.

We no longer have congestion in our classes since the new classrooms are specious enough with two students occupying a desk. It is very unusual in most Kenyan schools to have two students on a desk. At most, a desk is occupied by three to five students and even some sit on the floor for lack of desk. Thanks for such a wonderful gesture.

Due to your efforts, our school was selected by the Ministry of Education as Center of Excellent and E-Learning Center for Primary schools. This gives us an edge over other schools as news ideas/methods are first tested at our school before spreading to other primary schools in the district. This is greatly improving our academic standards and extra-curricular activities.

I am confident that the new classrooms and library at Pathfinder Academy will enable us remain among the top performing schools in our region in national examinations. Our only greatest challenge now is to find more books for the library.

It is the first time ever to have an official library time instituted in any Primary school. Pathfinder Academy is the first school in the region to have official library time approved by School Management Committee. Thanks for your efforts.

You have made the lives of many students in this school to change positively. They used to feel rejected but now the have fit in the society. Praise be unto God.

You deserve a credit for all that you have done for Pathfinder Academy and the community at large.

Once again, may I thank you and well-wishers for tirelessly denying yourself for the sake of our orphan and vulnerable students. You will ever remain in our minds and may the Almighty God shower his blessings upon you.

Your sincerely,

Joshua Amwai Machinga.

Valentines for Zimbabwe

On February 13 the Toledo First Seventh-day Adventist Church held its third annual benefit banquet, this time for Amistad’s Murwira Orphanage project in Zimbabwe. The featured speaker was Carl Wilkens, nephew of Murwira director Paula Leen. Wilkens was the only American relief worker who chose to stay in Rwanda during that country’s hundred day genocide in 1994.

Volunteer chef Ray Riley and his lovely wife Judy prepared a special meal for the 100+ guests in attendance, complete with red velvet lace-embossed cupcakes. In recent years the Toledo First Church has put service and issues of social justice at the forefront of its mission, reflected in events such as the annual Valentine’s banquet. Community guests came away deeply moved by the stories Wilkens told about Paula’s work in Zimbabwe and the plight her children face each day. Although figures are still being tallied, the church estimates that approximately $3500 was raised for Murwira Orphanage.

To give to Scott's team

To donate to Scott's team, please go to our PayPal donation page and click the yellow "donate" button.

Update from Scott Nelson, from his weblog

Friday, January 29, 2010

Port au Prince – The Initial Days

To see more images click here (some may be graphic)

Perhaps this disaster represents the greatest accumulation of orthopaedic injuries to ever occur in one place at one time. Here in Santo Domingo it felt just like another California earthquake, but soon word arrived that it was far worse. Having made 19 previous trips to operate in Haiti over recent years we were able to rapidly prepare our armamentarium and make plans to mobilize to Port au Prince, 160 miles to the west. By the time we departed on Thursday afternoon less than 48 hours after the earthquake, the chaos of early response teams was just beginning. We lifted off without knowing if we would be able to land in PAP or if there would be anyone to receive us. It was like going into a black hole as we had no information aside from what we were all seeing on CNN. We were prepared with food and water to survive for 2 days and no return ticket.

Team members were:

Steve Bostian – Executive Director CURE DR
Dielika Charlier MD – Pediatrician
Lucia Hernandez RN
Scott Nelson MD - Orthopaedic Surgery
Susan Beemer RN – anesthetist

Dielika grew up in PAP and was able to get a single text message through to Johnny Boulos a friend of her brother. After circling the airstrip 20 times we were able to get clearance to land the plane for 3 minutes. We made a steep descent and dumped our equipment onto the airfield and our pilot quickly returned to the air. Fortunately, Johnny had waited for us all afternoon and was there to greet us. To make a long story short we are indebted to the entire Boulos family for their hospitality and generosity in facilitating everything that we were able to accomplish during the last 2 weeks.

We initially made some brief visits to assess the operating facilities at approximately 6 different hospitals. 48-72 hours after the quake there was still not a single operation going on at any of the hospitals that we visited except for Hopital Adventiste d’Haiti where the innovative local medical director had created an operating room tent out of surgical drapes and was performing life saving amputations in front of the hospital. His nurse in the yellow short sleeve dress had just returned to work. She had been comforting her 10 year old son for who was trapped under a cement girder for 36 hours after the quake. A UN crane finally had come to free him and as the heavy cement girder was lifted it slipped from the grip of the crane… Another worker was at the hospital looking for 8 body bags for her family members. At every facility there were hundreds of languishing patients, most of whom were laying outside due to fear of aftershocks. Many of them were developing gangrene, some dying, and others already dead. It was utter chaos and no help was in sight. Where should we start…

With promises to return and help Dr. Archer, the medical director at Adventist Hospital, I returned to the Hopital de la Communaute Haitien where our team had already begun setting up. Here we had earlier discovered two operating rooms with electricity, running, water and even air conditioning a luxury in Haiti under normal circumstances. Due to our timely arrival and preparedness we were able to establish a leadership role at this facility and coordinate subsequent surgical teams who arrived to help. I began operating on Friday afternoon – 3 days had now passed since the quake. For the first several days operations consisted of life saving amputations and debridements. Injuries were far worse than they appeared due to the extensive soft tissue damage from crush injuries. This caused compartment syndromes (uncontrolled swelling which leads to vascular compromise) and then to gangrene. Patients were dehydrated, decompensated, and anemic. There was no mechanism or time to get labs, nor anything we could do differently had we been able to accurately assess their status. Patients were dying in the hallway outside the OR while waiting for surgery. Some who were operated died as well, as they were already too critical to save. This presented another difficulty in deciding whether to operate the most serious patients first or concentrate on slightly less critical patients who had a better chance of survival.



After 24 hours of operating, a team from the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City arrived. They had flown down on the Synthes plane fully loaded with an extensive array of donated implants and materials. Their expertise and equipment combined with the momentum we had already established allowed us to continue operating in both rooms day and night for the next 3 days catching only a couple hours of sleep here and there. We are deeply indebted to the Synthes company and the timely arrival of this team which allowed us to salvage many severe injuries that would have otherwise been amputated. It was an operative marathon like none other and as the hours passed periods of daylight and nighttime melted into one long day. Emotions were high and fatigue was intense. I worked day and night for 6 days until I felt like I was starting to loose my focus and was able to escape the hospital and get a full 6 hours of sleep.

During the first few days the situation went from bad to worse. The many injured patients were developing infections and gangrenous limbs faster than we could operate. A couple days after we began operating the stench of death strengthened and permeated the hallways and courtyards of the hospital. Dead limbs still attached to patients, dead bodies, and amputated parts all contributed. Slowly we were able to overcome this and each day the hospital seemed to metamorphose. Patients were operated, volunteers showed up with bleach, halls were cleaned and chaos was organized little by little. An entire hospital infrastructure was to be created in the ensuing days. Masking tape was used on the foreheads of the victims to delineate OR 1 – emergent cases, or OR 2 – operative but less emergent cases. The first 4 days were spent operating only on OR 1’s which consisted of open fractures, compartment syndromes, and treating severe open wounds and infections.

Wednesday morning one week after the quake the 6.1 aftershock hit and all the patients rapidly cleared the hospital building. We took advantage of the situation by mopping the halls and slowly bringing all the patients back in to the building one by one in an organized fashion. Luckily we had arisen 15 minutes before the shock as part of the cement wall above our heads had collapsed where we had been lying.

Over a period of one week we were able to convert several adjacent rooms into operating rooms and the 2 room OR suite became a 6 room operating facility where we coordinated surgical volunteers from all over the US, Sweden, Jamaica, and Korea and other countries. The arrival of the Dallas team on a chartered 737 with several tons of equipment was a great boost our dwindling operating room supplies and fatigued OR crew. We had to stop surgery for several hours to organize, but in short order we were almost equipped like an American style operating room. During the subsequent 24 hours we treated more than a dozen femur fractures using the SIGN intramedulary nail system. The SIGN nail is a state of the art implant system design for use in resource challenged environments where intraoperative x-ray is not available. We were privileged to be operating with the founder and inventor of the system, Dr. Lew Zirkle who had previously treated a record number of 5 patients in a single day using the implant. In most cases these severely injured patients with femur fractures could immediately begin unrestricted ambulation.



We continue in collaboration with the Hopital Adventiste d’Haiti where the situation is very similar to the Hopital de la Communaute Haitien. The arrival of Dr. Brad Walters from Georgia and Andrew Haglund from Loma Linda University established coordination efforts at that facility. Initial plans are being made to create a large scale ongoing project to treat the generations of people that will be affected with orthopaedic needs for years to come at this facility.

It did become necessary to place armed security at the entrance of the hospital and other strategic locations to provide crowd control and resolve some looting that began to take place as food and supplies arrived on site. However, I personally never felt unsafe and would dare to say that with the additional military and NGO presence, most parts of Port au Prince may be more secure now than they have been in a long time. Of course many render my opinions on security as worthless as they consider me to have a lack of risk aversion.

It was a trip of physical endurance, emotional intensity, and spiritual contemplation. It brought my mind back to a scene several years ago of one of our Haitian patients who fell asleep with her Bible open to Psalm 46.

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.
Ps 46:1-3

On January 25 I returned to Santo Domingo for several days to be with family and attend to my responsibilities. On Saturday January 30 Marni and I will be driving back to Port au Prince to continue the work and relieve those that are on the scene at the moment. We are living day by day and will focus our efforts where we are most needed during the ensuing months.

I would like to acknowledge the efforts of our team members not mentioned above who were also working day and night to support the efficiency of our operation both in Port au Prince and around the world. These in include my wife Marni in Santo Domingo, Robbie Jackson - Cure DR, Erin Card - Cure US, Jeff Douglas and Andrew Haglund in Port au Prince and the many other medical personnel who rapidly activated the delivery of their expertise and medical supplies.

To see more images click here (some may be graphic)

Posted by Scott Nelson at 1:12 PM
Labels: Haiti, scott nelson

More on Scott Nelson in Haiti

Doctor commits to crushing task
The work of Dr. Scott Nelson is crushing. It’s crushing in the numbers of people he’s treating in Haiti since the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country was leveled by a magnitude-7 earthquake on Jan. 12.
The wounds he’s seeing are crushing in nature, the horrific result of humans caught in flimsy construction when the quake hit.
And the scope of the tragedy is taking its own crushing, psychic toll on those who have gone to the island nation to help repair the torn and mashed bodies of men, women and children.
•••
Scott Nelson, the son of Peter and Suzanne Nelson, moved to San Luis Obispo in 1970 when he was a week old. In retrospect, it’s safe to say he had medical missionary blood running through his veins: His grandfather, Dr. Olavi Rouhe, served for more than 25 years at a mission in what was then the Belgian Congo. Nelson has said that after having visited his grandfather’s African hospital, church and compound when he was 8, he decided to go into medicine.
That decision, as well as an international outlook, was probably reinforced when he joined his father, a San Luis Obispo dentist, on travels to 25 countries around the world where Peter would work at dental clinics.
•••
Nelson, 39, is a devoted Christian who has followed a family tradition in attending the Seventh-day Adventist Loma Linda University in Southern California. Indeed, his great-grandfather was the president of the university at one time. Nelson graduated from Loma Linda in 1996 in orthopedic surgery with an emphasis on children. He thrives in what he does, says his father, and that enthusiasm has led him to be one of the top surgeons in his field.
As it turns out, Nelson’s Christian ethic and professional skills dovetailed nicely with a nonprofit organization called CURE International. It’s a nondenominational organization that specializes in childhood bone deformities in developing countries.
So he joined forces with CURE and packed up wife Marni and sons Chad and Alex five years ago and headed to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, for a five-year medical and faith-based mission.
The work is a challenge on every level. The pay, for example, is $20,000 a year and requires that he return stateside to practice one week every three months at Riverside County Hospital to help make ends meet.
And there’s physical menace attached to his Dominican practice: Each of the 22 times he’s traveled to Haiti to perform surgery on that island nation’s club-footed children, he’s had to be on the lookout for kidnappers who have been known to return at least one abductee without an arm because he could only raise half his ransom.
But Scott Nelson loves what he does and whom he does it for. He takes deep satisfaction in being able to mend a child’s orthopedic deformity, which, really, is somewhat of a miracle that can make all the difference in how that child can make his or her way in life. It’s that fulfillment that his father says led him to say at one time: “The best payment I ever got was two mangoes and a hug.”
•••
When word came that parts of Haiti had been devastated on the other end of Hispaniola from Santo Domingo, Nelson quickly put together a team and chartered a plane for the 160-mile flight to Port-au-Prince.
As we now know, confusion, uncertainty and disorder was already reigning at the Port-au-Prince airport. Who was allowed to land was as much of a panicked mystery as to who was allowed to take off.
After circling for an hour, Nelson, according to the plane’s pilot, “sweet-talked” ground control into letting the plane land for three minutes.
“I got him on the ground,” the pilot later related, “but I don’t know what happened to him.” What happened was Scott Nelson and team immediately went to work.
•••
Peter Nelson has been in sporadic touch with his son; last week, Scott Nelson told his father in a phone call: “ ‘Dad, I get about two to three hours of sleep a night. I’ve had about 90 surgeries so far (as of Jan. 19), with another 20 patients lined up and another 100 left outside. I can’t go outside because they’ll mob me (for help).’ ”
“Are you doing lots of plates and rods?” the senior Nelson asked his son.
“ ‘No, because of the crush wounds, it’s not reconstructive surgery. I’ve literally been cleaning maggots out of wounds. There’s terrible infection and gangrene. Once we get them healing up, then I can go back and do the reconstructive work.’ ”
When Peter Nelson asked his son how he was holding up, he replied:
“ ‘I’m doing good right now, but two days ago I thought I was falling apart. But I’m doing better.’ ”
He told his father that the trauma surgeons who had come to Haiti to help him “ ‘just fell apart and started crying; they couldn’t do it anymore. They’ve left now; couldn’t take it. The psychological coping of the situation was overwhelming to them.’
“I know they’ve got a lot of physicians on the ground working, but they’re all going to leave in two weeks because of their practices,” Peter Nelson said. “There’s going to be a need for a lot of long-term care, and he’s committed himself to being there for the next six months. He’s going to need long-term support.”

“Thoughts and prayers in his behalf are just as important as money,” Peter Nelson said. “He’s our front man, but we’re all part of the team.”
Bill Morem can be reached at bmorem@thetribunenews.com or at 781-7852.

© 2010 San Luis Obispo Tribune and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com
=

Haiti

Webpage of this email: http://amistadinternational1.blogspot.com/

January, 2010 An update from Karen on our Amistad project in Haiti: Scott Nelson has been working with Amistad for a number of years - since he was a little boy and came with his parents, Peter and Suzanne Nelson, on Amistad mission trips to do dental clinics. Now he's a surgeon and an Amistad partner, who spends a lot of time operating in the Dominican Republic. Here's an update I just received from Scott, who was working in Santo Domingo at the time of the quake: "I felt the quake fairly strong here in Santo Domingo. It did not hit with a hard jolt or shake windows as we have all felt in California. I just suddenly felt like I had vertigo and then noticed the furniture rocking back and forth and it went on for about 20-30 seconds. We are about 160 miles from Port au Prince. I have been there multiple times, but the city where I usually work is Cap Haitien about 80 miles to the north. "The lack of infrastructure and grinding poverty in Port au Prince under normal circumstances is appalling. It is difficult to imagine decimation, suffering, and chaos that is going on at the moment. By land Port au Prince is about a 5 hour drive. We are standing by to help and will likely mobilize as soon as it is possible to travel with the security and infrastructure of an organization. "Obviously they need our prayers and help. I am leaving the Dominican Republic for Haiti as soon as possible, with a small team." Karen adds: By now, Scott is on his way to Haiti, or en route. He wrote again to say that they are preparing their equipment for amputations (this is the most likely scenario - possibly even amputating people out of where they're trapped.) We are collecting money for his team right now. He will be coming back to gather a larger team, so at that time they'll need money for more medicines. (Fortunately, they just got a big donation of medicines yesterday from an agency, that they can take with them right now!) If you want to send a donation for Dr. Scott Nelson, we have a special Amistad fund set aside for his surgery team. The easiest way is to follow this link, and click on the yellow "Donate" button. Make sure you mark it for Haiti. Call me if you have questions! Gratefully,     ......................................................................................................................................................... Contact information: To telephone Amistad International: 650-328-1737 To send a check: Amistad International, PO Box 455, Palo Alto, CA 94302 To e-mail executive director Karen Kotoske: tomamistad@aol.com Our website: http://www.amistadinternational.org/ Our blog: http://amistadinternational1.blogspot.com/ Our Facebook page: Amistad International

Forward email This email was sent to lseibold.amistad94303foundat@blogger.com by tomamistad@aol.com. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by Amistad International | PO Box 455 | Palo Alto | CA | 94302

A note from Dr. Scott Nelson

I felt the quake fairly strong here in Santo Domingo. It did not hit with a
hard jolt or shake windows as we have all felt in California. I just
suddenly felt like I had vertigo and then noticed the furniture rocking back
and forth and it went on for about 20-30 seconds. We are about 160 mi from
Port au Prince, I have been there multiple times, but the city where I
usually work is Cap Haitian about 80 mi to the north.

The lack of infrastructure and grinding poverty in Port au Prince under
normal circumstances is appalling. It is difficult to imagine decimation,
suffering, and chaos that is going on at the moment. By land Port au Prince
is about a 5 hour drive. We are standing by to help and will likely
mobilize as soon as it is possible to travel with the security and
infrastructure of an organization.

Obviously they need our prayers and help.

Scott

Karen adds:

Dr Scott Nelson is leaving tomorrow for Haiti with a small surgery team (anesthetist and nurse) , preparing their equipment today for very probable amputations (the most likely scenario for them.) We don't have time to get funds to them for this first trip. But he'll be coming back and going again and taking a larger team, so at that time they'll need donations for medical aid. They just got a big donation of medicines today from an agency so they can take them along tomorrow!

If anyone wants to send a donation for Dr. Scott Nelson (who is an orthopedic surgeon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) Amistad will hold them until Dr. Nelson goes on the next relief trip to Haiti.