Like everyone else, Dr. Patrick Guiteras followed the news reports of the January earthquake in Haiti and felt
Dr. Franklin Tew and Dr. Patrick Guiteras with Micah Johnson, a medical student at Brown. sympathy for the victims. But he hadn’t considered traveling to help them until he received an e-mail from his daughter, an actress in New York.
“She said, 'It’s terrible what’s happened. Here’s a number if you think you or some of your friends want to go,’' Guiteras recalls. “I said ‘I better go.’”
Guiteras, 67 and a doctor at Chapel Hill Family Medicine, recruited his friend Dr. Franklin Tew, also 67, who is retired, to go on the trip, which was coordinated by the International Medical Alliance. The doctors, who met in medical school at UNC in 1965, arrived in Jimani, Dominican Republic on Valentine’s Day with medical supplies in hand. There, 40 miles from the earthquake zone, tents with dirt floors were set up for victims who had fled. Medical volunteers slept on the floor of a dorm-like building.
“They were still operating on people with major extremity trauma, amputations, crush injuries,” says Guiteras. “We were there as medical people to look after the patients after they’d been operated on.” Guiteras and Tew worked 12 hours a day alongside volunteers from Brown University, the Mayo Clinic and Louisiana State University. Many patients were treated for complications 
The tent housed 29 male and female patients.that resulted from their surgeries -- infections, anemia, blood pressure and diabetes. Others were preparing for more rounds of surgery.
Both Guiteras and Tew were struck by the resilient and joyful spirit of the Haitian people.
“Every morning, we’d make our rounds. Here are people missing part of a leg or maybe their child is dead,” says Guiteras. “Yet they look you in the eye and ask you how you are.”
“You could hear them singing hymns in the tents at night,” says Tew. “Women just singing at top of voices and clapping.”
After five days, the pair returned home, with a changed outlook.
“The thing I learned about me is that we get so settled in our life here in the U.S.,” says Tew. “We have so many privileges. We really forget about the plight of other people in the world. That’s something I don’t want to forget -- the people there, their determination and the joy they had despite dire circumstances.”
“It was a powerful experience,” says Guiteras. “It reminded me of many things we all need to know about how other people live.”
A Creole translator shows some Carolina pride.
However, Guiteras says he has no illusions about his contributions. “I think I did a little bit of good for a few people,” he says. “But I wonder what these folks are going to go back to. And what’s going to happen to the country.”
And what does his daughter think? “She said, ‘I’m proud of you, Daddy,’” says Guiteras. “If you get your daughter’s approval, it was all worthwhile."
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