Helping in Haiti

By Ray Pitz

The Sherwood Gazette, Jun 27, 2010 (2 Reader comments)

Photo courtesy of P.J. Pitts

While helping out with the aftermath of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, P.J. Pitts made lots of new young friends, above.

Even in pharmacy school, P.J. Pitts pondered aloud what if she simply ended up as a pharmacist at a retail store. A fellow student mulled the question before responding, “You couldn’t do it. You were meant for greater things.”

Those greater things occurred this winter when Pitts traveled to Haiti after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake that destroyed so much of the capital of Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of residents in the Caribbean country.

Pitt recently returned in early June to help out for the third time since the earthquake.

Pitts, whose job in the states is that of a compounding pharmacist for Broadway Apothecary in Eugene, is chief pharmacy officer for the University of Miami’s Project Medishare, which has been doing work in Haiti since 1994.

“We were on the ground in Haiti the day after the earthquake,” said Pitts of the makeshift hospital Medishare constructed in Port-au-Prince.

The 1997 Sherwood High School graduate holds a doctorate in pharmacy from Pacific University.

In Haiti, Pitts controls the flow of pharmaceutical needed to supply two large makeshift hospital tents along with a 140-bed tent where the volunteers sleep.

“Inside the tents we have plywood (floors). The E.R. is gravel,” she said. “We’re actually the height of medical technology in Haiti.”

Conditions are so primitive that volunteers often have to swat flies off patients during surgery and doctors read X-rays by flashlight due to a lack of electricity.

“There’s not reliable power in Port-au-Prince, period,” said Pitts.

Even though she traveled halfway around the world to Haiti, Pitts met two Sherwood residents there including Carolyn Wack, a nurse who was Maid Marian in the 1962 Robin hood Festival.

“I would call her Maid Marian,” said Pitts. “How crazy is that, that she spent her entire life five minutes from where I live.”

Pitts said she has bonded with fellow Americans and Haitians through working 18 hour days and sleeping in tight quarters where the cots are only inches from each other.

The third-world conditions also have caused her and others to improvise if they don’t have an item. She likens it to ordering a drink at a bar and the bartender says he doesn’t have those specific ingredients but he can make you something similar.

The same goes for creating specific drug mixtures.

“I joke about doing ‘MacGyver’ medicines,” she said.

One thing the earthquake did was prove how poorly constructed the country’s buildings were with half crumbling when the earthquake occurred. Although there were hundreds of thousands who died instantly, many survived with what initially were minor injuries that turned serious because of lack of proper medical care.

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