Singapore NGO Treats Hundreds of Haitian Quake Victims

Friday, Jan. 29, 2010 Posted: 8:05:34PM HKT

A Singaporean doctor, part of the first CityCare medical relief team, treating a Haitian woman. (Photo: CityCare)

Volunteerism will go any lengths, literally.

When a strong earthquake devastated the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince on January 12, a team of Singapore doctors, nurses and other volunteers from CityCare rushed to the scene, set up a makeshift clinic in the ruined town of Carrefour and started treating victims’ injuries.

The non-governmental organisation was the first to start work in Haiti, CityNews reported, with volunteers arriving in the Haitian town on January 18.

CityCare’s first team attended to some 100 patients everyday for a week.

Then the pace accelerated for the subsequent two teams, with a team leader giving a daily average of between 200 to 300 patients on Twitter.

The NGO, which was set up by the deputy senior pastor of City Harvest Church The Reverend Tan Ye Peng to equip Singaporeans to serve as volunteers, plans to dispatch a total of five teams, each for a period of ten days, over the next few weeks to bring maximum relief to Haitians.

Dr Tan Hun Hoe, a consultant urologist who was part of the first CityCare relief team to Haiti, said that of all the disaster relief trips he had participated in, this was the most horrific, according to CityNews.

Around half of the town the NGO worked in had been destroyed and the team had to work from a church, the only standing structure in the area.

There was a middle-aged Haitian lady the team treated with maggots crawling out of her fractured face.

When the earthquake hit, the house had collapsed on her, trapping her upper body and exposing her wounds.

Nathanael Ng
nathanael@christianpost.com