By France Hurtubise
“Every day, I am seeing children suffering from the after-effects of having lost their homes or close family members in the hurricane,” says Emilie Gauthier-Paré, an emergency psychosocial specialist.
Émilie works with the Canadian Red Cross and is part of a mobile medical team making daily visits to remote villages of the Grand’Anse region of southwest Haiti, an area that was devastated by Hurricane Matthew.
As other team members offer primary health care and raise awareness about a worsening cholera outbreak, Emilie provides psychological first aid to patients showing signs of distress.
She also tries to quickly identify available support services and helping hands within or near the affected communities, like church leaders, neighbours, family and Haitian Red Cross volunteers. She also seeks out mental health professionals, should she need to refer severe cases to specialists.
“My number one challenge is to make do with the scant resources I find locally when people are in such dire need of help,” notes Emilie.
In the village of Moline, in the commune of Pastel, she identified a local priest as a valuable resource in providing comfort to traumatized hurricane-survivors.
“Many children and others come to the clinic on an empty stomach, and that alone adds to their stressed condition,” says Emilie. “In Moline, the priest welcomed us so warmly and I was able to refer a whole family to him that had not eaten anything in days and was filled with anxiety about their situation.”
Emilie notes that the hurricane not only destroyed homes, crops and infrastructure, it disrupted the social fabric of communities.
“When the social fabric is impacted to this extent, almost everyone suffers and ends up among the victims,” says Emilie. “Even the most resilient residents are without the means to help the most vulnerable.”
On this day, an eight-year-old girl, Medjinn, arrives alone at the mobile medical clinic set-up in Anse-d’Hainault. She has a badly infected eye. Emilie speaks with her and soon learns that Medjinn’s family lost everything to the hurricane. The girl was home when Matthew struck and she can’t stop thinking about the nightmare, and her doll, which flew away with everything else the family owned.
According to Emilie, everyone who has been through a crisis or has witnessed the suffering of close relations is at risk of some form of psychological damage. Psychosocial specialists look for clues that a person is under extreme stress or in a state of shock. In children, there is often a lack of appetite or interest in playing.
“It is critically important to reconnect traumatized children to normal behaviours, like the excitement of playing games,” adds Emilie. “We look for available tools and materials — balls, pencils, paper, paint, almost anything will do, it does not have to be a sophisticated toy. The idea is to nudge the child back on the path of resuming a normal life.”
The mobile medical clinic is comprised of Canadian Red Cross and French Red Cross aid workers. It operates in close collaboration with Haiti’s Ministry of Health and the Haiti Red Cross Society in remote villages in Grand’Anse department. Over 1000 patients have been seen by the medical team since late October.
