Danville's Wheelchair Foundation sends supplies, medical workers to Haiti

DANVILLE — Tim Miller didn’t think about going to Haiti. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, the thought just never crossed his mind, as there was no way the registered nurse from Fresno could get to the earthquake-stricken Caribbean island country more than 3,000 miles away.

Then a family member — an attorney for Danville’s Wheelchair Foundation — called. The nonprofit, which has sent more than 800,000 wheelchairs in almost 10 years to countries around the world, was sending a private airliner filled with medical workers and supplies to aid to the country devastated by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12.

The trip changed his life.

“I’ll go any chance I get,” said Miller, who has been on missionary trips to Mexico but nothing like the one he and a handful of others from Selma Community Hospital made last week.

Though he had spent a few years in an intensive care unit before taking his current job a year ago, Miller said he had never seen such suffering. “Every single family has been torn apart.”

The foundation made the trip last week, using the private MD-87 airplane of housing developer Ken Behring, the nonprofit’s founder, said Jeff Behring, a son who volunteered on the trip.

The plane, based in Stockton, made two trips between Wednesday and Saturday that week. The first was to Southern California and then Fort Lauderdale, Fla., before heading to Haiti — picking up people and supplies along the way. It then returned to Florida to get more people and supplies before returning back to Haiti.

Besides the delivery, Jeff Behring said, they also ferried medical workers who were looking for flights back. In total they brought 12,000 pounds of medical supplies and transported about 30 workers, he said.

Behring said a lot of the work was bringing antibiotics and other supplies for small problems that can turn big,

“Even the minor stuff can turn to amputation if you don’t take care of it,” he said. The supplies came from John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek and nonprofit MedShare in San Leandro, he said.

Behring said the effort was sparked after a music industry-related company, which was also looking at ways to support the organization, called asking about putting together some help. Besides big name acts like New Kids on the Block and Rage Against the Machine giving support, Scott Stapp, the lead singer of the band Creed, went with them to help, Behring said.

Behring said it’s unknown if there will be another plane trip, as the group wants to maximize its continuing help.

In addition to the help by plane, about 520 wheelchairs from the foundation will get there by boat in about six weeks. They are going first to hospitals, but will eventually go to patients. The group hopes to send another 1,500. He said the wheelchairs, which are new, cost about $150 each.

Miller, the nurse from Fresno, said seeing children suffer was the hardest. He worked in tent facilities, one for minor wounds and infections and another for more serious needs, like amputations. At the latter, he said there were two to four staff members for every 75 to 80 patients.

He said one father came in with a child suffering from a distended abdomen, a result of the breast-fed baby’s mother dying. An 8-year-old girl came in with a perforated appendicitis.

“If she hadn’t gotten there when she did she would have died,” he said. “It was touch and go, but in the morning she woke up and smiled.”

But then there are those he could not help, like a boy with a depressed skull fracture, who was paralyzed — he had received major injuries when his dad frantically tried digging his family from rubble.

“He probably wasn’t going to make it very long,” Miller said.

For more information go to www.planetohaiti.org or www.wheelchairfoundation.org

SOURCE: Contra Costa Times