The Dayton DMAT OH-5 Disaster Medical Assistance Team — including Paramedic Judi Grampp (seated at table, 2nd from R) and Dr. Kim Kwiatek (seated, R) — was in Port-au-Prince Jan. 25-Feb. 3. This was the team’s first overseas deployment.

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer, March 2010

On Jan 12, the day a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, the Dayton Disaster Medical Assistance Team was put on standby.

“We were told to prepare for a two-week stay, with medications for a month in case, and that it was going to be extremely strenuous,” said Dayton DMAT Paramedic Judi Grampp, 65, who works in the ER at Good Samaritan Hospital.

Grampp and Dr. Kim Kwiatek, 57 — an emergency physician with Kettering Health Network — were among the 32 members with the Dayton DMAT to establish and run a field critical care clinic/hospital in Port-au-Prince, Jan. 25-Feb. 3.

This was Dayton DMAT’s first overseas deployment. The Haitian government sent the team to set up at a soccer field near the airport, next to the Israeli Defense Forces aid mission field hospital. The Dayton group arrived one day before the IDF’s departure.

Kwiatek, who speaks Hebrew, and his unit commander went ahead of their team, still waiting at the U.S. Embassy, to assess the situation, connect with the Israelis, and to learn from them.

“I got to meet some of their physicians, their general, the commander of their team,” he said. “They saw over 1,100 patients, did a lot of surgeries. They had a very sophisticated setup. They had their rabbi and ZAKA was there for search and rescue.”

“They got there first,” Grampp said of the Israelis, “and handled the worst immediate casualties. They were set up within 48 hours, which is amazing.”

Israeli meds and meals
Kwiatek said the Israelis were able to set up in Haiti so rapidly because, as he understood it, the soccer complex was owned by Israel’s consul general to Haiti.

“In a sense, we were on Israeli territory,” Kwiatek said. “And so there was an Israeli flag that flew there even after the Israeli unit left until the 82nd Airborne (which provided security to Dayton DMAT) took it down. They weren’t allowed to fly the American flag because of international political sensitivities.”

Grampp said the Israelis left medicine and two-man tents for Dayton DMAT’s use.
“That was great,” Kwiatek said, “because we were short in a number of areas. It helped flesh out our pharmacy cache, which is geared for American response.”

When members of the IDF aid mission learned that Kwiatek keeps kosher, they left him four cartons of kosher food.

“Normally on these deployments, I get the worst food, the vegetarian MREs,” he said. “And this time, I had the best food of anybody. A lot of people got to share and taste.”

Davening in the field
On the day after Dayton DMAT arrived — the day the IDF was leaving — Kwiatek joined a group of Israelis for morning prayers.

“I laid tefillin with them and davened with them,” he said.

“On the Friday night we were there,” Grampp said, “I asked Kim if we could do a little tiny Shabbat service, the two of us, because we were the only Jewish people there. And on Saturday morning, we went off and did a little five-minute Shabbat service because I needed to do Kaddish for my father and brother.”

Treatments
Grampp said it took her unit a day to set up and open its doors. But their field hospital was empty at first. “Everyone knew the Israeli hospital was closed, but they didn’t know what we were,” she said.

“We had a full pharmacy, we had casting, we could do minor surgical procedures, but we did not have anesthesia or an anesthesiologist or a respirator, so we shipped those kind of people out.”

Unit members worked from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. On their busiest day, Grampp said, they treated 260 people. “And it was hot. It was 105 degrees outside. And that’s what we did every day. We saved some lives, we delivered only one baby (a C-section had to be shipped out).”

Dayton DMAT also offered ongoing trauma care. “People who were in line to get food from some international agency were attacked and had their food taken from them,” Kwiatek said. “One was whacked on the head, being knocked out and cut up.”

The unit also treated those with chronic illnesses who had never received proper care.
“People in Haiti don’t have much health care in the best of times,” Kwiatek said. “So a lot of people showed up with 20-year-old problems that they were hoping we could take care of for them.”

Grampp talked about one woman with a deformed jaw as the result of a tumor, who had never been treated. “We sent her to the navy ship Comfort to see if they could make arrangements for her to have surgery.”

“But there were also sad, chronic cases,” Kwiatek said, “that there simply is no facility for in Haiti, which we had to say to them, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for you.’”

Infant malnutrition was rampant. “So many babies were just found, or their mothers were killed and families were taking care of them,” Grampp said. “But since breast feeding is the norm, they don’t know how to feed these babies and they came in critically ill. And we sent about half a dozen home in a relatively healthy condition with a year’s worth of Similac: part of either our cache or the Israeli cache. And we gave away so much, and any meds that we had that weren’t narcotics, like the Israelis, we gave it to the next groups coming in. Most of us left our pup tents and sleeping bags for the Haitians to use and take.”

In total, Grampp says Dayton DMAT treated 600-700 people.

“It was extremely rewarding and it was extremely tough living,” she said. “We didn’t see all the horrible things that they talked about in the first two weeks. I was the second oldest person and I didn’t know if I could do it, but I did. I worked as hard as everybody else, helped put up tents. The only difference was that after our briefing in the evening, about 7:30, some people stayed up to play cards, I wrote in my journal and crashed.”

The choice to deploy
In 1991, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association established Dayton DMAT, which operates under the National Disaster Medical System, an entity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Grampp joined in 1992; Kwiatek said he has been with the unit for more than eight years. DMAT members can sign up for monthly deployments.

When deployed, they are federal employees. Until the Haiti mission, Dayton DMAT was deployed to U.S. disasters and high-profile national events.

Grampp and Kwiatek have also taken part in the emergency response group training at Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Israel, a project of Partnership With Israel.

Grampp said the decision to go to Haiti wasn’t difficult for her. “It was desperately difficult for my husband. He was terrified. But my girls thought it was the neatest thing.”

Everyone in the unit came home with what Kwiatek called the “Haiti Hack,” from the dust, burning garbage, and the “odor from the death.” He also came home with bronchitis.

“Emotionally, I don’t know that you go and do something like this and come back exactly the same person,” he said.

“I’ve never been to a third-world country and I don’t know if the term exists, but I think after the earthquake, you could even label Haiti a fourth-world country. The poverty is astounding. The people are very stoic; they don’t have a lot of expectations from life, they don’t react to trauma and pain the way Americans do.”

Related article: Why Israel went to Haiti