JIMANI, Dominican Republic March 2010 — At the public hospital in this border town, no one can say how many amputations have been done since the earthquake. One surgeon says he did 32 yesterday. Another says 22 in the two days before. Mostly legs. Mostly from infection. They come in truck beds, the backseats of taxis and police vans, one of the small colorful Haitian buses, showed up full of people, most of them from Petionville, the exclusive enclave of Port-au-Prince. The lucky ones have crushed arms and legs but keep their limbs. They lie in body casts, whole. They may limp. They may need canes. But they do not belong to the burgeoning class of Haitian amputees.

This is the signature injury of the catastrophe. In medical tents and operating rooms across the disaster zone, surgeons saw without ceasing. They work in conditions their forebears from battlefields of 150 years ago would find familiar. Without power, sometimes with instruments sterilized in vodka, they struggle to keep pace with the implacable advance of gangrenous rot that has turned treatable injuries into life threatening ones "There is no place in Haiti for people like me," says Joaz Nancie, 27 "Without my leg, I am a freak. Cripples are rejected here."

The seven surgeons at this hospital — all living in the Dominican Republic — work from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day. The hand saws they use look like files.
— steam sterilizers, a sonogram machine and strong antibiotics.

A young girl 9 year old Mailine Noelle tells Dr. Eric Thierry that she needs her feet to help feed her family. The young woman tells him that she will no longer be lovable.

Thierry, a thoracic surgeon, tells her the same thing: "Don't worry. You will get a beautiful prosthesis and be fine. "But later he says he wishes he could believe his own words: "I hope so," he said.

“El futuro no es muy prometedor para esta ola de personas con amputaciones”

Healing Hands for Haiti, el único centro de fabricación de prótesis y de rehabilitación clínica a tiempo completo en Haiti, quedó prácticamente destruido por el terremoto. Los organizadores no pueden entrar a lo que queda en pie de su edificio para ver si pueden rescatar algo de los equipos por más de $100,000 para fabricar prótesis. Ayudanos a ayudar a otros…….
2010 Miss Mundo Latina US con una vision humanitaria.