FLINT, Michigan — Just outside an orange grove near a village in the Dominican Republic, blankets hung between trees to shield a makeshift medical clinic.
Surrounded by a villager’s donated kitchen table, cardboard boxes and duct tape, a group of local nursing students helped bring healthcare to natives with scarce medical access.
There were sugar cane workers with machete knife wounds. Four year olds with hernias. Some had parasites, lice and skin infections. Some were malnourished.
All were devastatingly poor.
The University of Michigan-Flint group who traveled to the third-world country in late February had been prepared to see Haiti quake survivors, many who reportedly crossed over the border for medical assistance.
But most of the 504 patients the service group helped in just eight days were not injured from the next-door tragedy.
“I think it’s very sad that the only time we think about other countries is when a huge disaster happens,” said nursing student Melissa Allen, 23, who went on the trip with Midwest Medical Michigan that included doctors and other medical professionals.
“For six months we focus on Haiti and after six months, we forget about them. But they don’t forget. The only time we open our eyes to what’s happening in the world is when the media shows us or tells us. Everyday, people there are dying of things like malnutrition or poor hygiene. We don’t want to think about it.”
Allen was among three UM-Flint students, as well as several UM-Flint faculty members and alumni who met up with a non-local team for the overseas trip.
The more than decade-old service trip was almost canceled this year after a Jan. 12 magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated the Caribbean island.
Students then heard they would maybe be helping some of the survivors.
But when the group arrived at Haiti’s neighboring nation, they found hundreds of people whose medical needs were not caused by any natural catastrophe.
“It’s no different for them before or after the earthquake because those are the types of conditions people lived with almost every single day,” said Maureen Tippen, a clinical assistant professor at the UM-Flint who has organized similar trips for nearly 14 years.
The team mostly split their time between clinics in remote villages and the Antonio Musa Hospital in San Pedro where they assisted with 84 surgeries such as gall bladder procedures and hysterectomies using all of their own supplies.
“Some people can’t really get to where they need to go so we brought a medical clinic to them,” Tippen said. “Students gain just tremendous critical thinking skills because they have to improvise so much.”
They traveled more than an hour through unpaved roads in sugar cane forests to get to village areas where they set up clinics in churches, schools and fields.
They used shoelaces to tie blankets to the trees for privacy. They filled hangers designed for shoe storage with medications and medical supplies. They played soccer with the children and gave them toys.
Each person on the trip also filled half of a personal suitcase, plus a 50-pound duffel bag, with supplies such as hospital gowns, antibiotics and toothbrushes.
UM-Flint nursing senior Genny Carley said she was surprised at how simple everyday American products went a long way. Many people suffering from fungal skin and scalp infections for example could be treated with Head and Shoulders because of a chemical in the shampoo.
And Tylenol helped pain and inflammation for arthritis.
“We didn’t see many people from Haiti,” Carley said. “But I was surprised to see so much need right in the Dominican Republic ... just to see the things they don’t have that we take for granted.”