Southern Baptist medical units from Kentucky and Mississippi will leave for Port-Au-Prince Jan. 30, while Florida and South Carolina medical units will fly out Wednesday, Feb. 3. The teams will have 10 members each – including doctors, nurses, chaplains and disaster relief experts.
The teams from Kentucky and Mississippi were in a position to lead the effort because they were “on call” in the Baptist Global Response disaster relief rotation, explained Jim Brown, BGR’s U.S. director. Florida and South Carolina were able to quickly provide follow up assistance because they were on call the previous month.
Both Kentucky and Mississippi provided leaders for the joint assessment team – Coy Webb from Kentucky and Don Gann from Mississippi – that returned from Haiti Jan. 25.
Medical teams from Arkansas and North Carolina recently completed ministry stints in Haiti and returned home.
Chaplains were added as an integral part of response teams because the joint assessment team saw the need to provide care for survivors, the volunteer team itself, and for Haitian care givers, Brown noted.
Transportation directly into Port-Au-Prince continues to be an obstacle. The airport still has only one operational runway, which military and private aircraft must use to both land and take off. Commercial airline flights still are prohibited. These initial four medical teams will be traveling to Port-au-Prince through the Dominican Republic, Brown added. Southern Baptist personnel in the Dominican Republic, working in partnership with BGR, are helping facilitate and organize the volunteers’ travel into Haiti.
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With reporting from Baptist Press
Tags: Baptist Global Response, earthquake, Haiti