Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010

Amid Haiti's chaos, local heroes emerge

The last thing Linda Graham expected to do on her trip to Haiti was to deliver two babies in an earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince hospital room with no running water or supplies.

Not only does Graham have no medical training, she had never been to Haiti and can speak no Creole.

"There was no one to help," said Graham, 41, a home-schooling mom from Apex. "I had a glimmer of hope it could be done."

Graham, Kellee Metty and another woman, Lisa Lewis, recently told hundreds of people at King's Park International Church in Durham of their five-day ordeal in Haiti, including the delivery of two babies.

The three women, all members of King's Park, received a standing ovation from the congregation, who brushed away tears and signed checks to help support the work the women had intended to do before the earthquake hit.

In that way, Graham, Metty and Lewis collectively gave birth once again - not to a baby but to a congregational commitment to help a struggling nation recover and rebuild from a devastating disaster.

Just a few weeks earlier, Graham and Lewis had agreed to accompany Metty to a small orphanage west of Haiti's capital city.

The three women arrived in the Caribbean nation last week with clothes, blankets, teddy bears and basic medical supplies they hoped to deliver to Val Children's Homecare, which the Metty family of Chapel Hill had begun to help a few years ago.

Alongside Raleigh dentist Julia Zervos, the women made it through customs and collected their baggage. They were sitting in an Isuzu Trooper ready to be driven to the orphanage when they felt the car begin to shake.

"I thought it was the porters putting away the luggage in the back," said Metty, 49, who worked in Haiti years ago.

But the shaking didn't stop, and the women wondered for a second if some men had begun to rock the car as a way to scare them out.

Then they saw the trees swaying violently and realized it was an earthquake.

Instead of going to the orphanage, they got as far as a soccer field where thousands of Haitians had fled. The roads had become impassable with downed electrical wires and debris. A woman who had been taking a shower ran out of a house naked and wet.

As day turned to night, the soccer field became a sanctuary, literally and figuratively. After each aftershock, the Haitians shouted "hallelujah," and "bless the Lord," and "Jesus is king." All night long, people prayed and sang to God.

'You have to come'

But by the following morning, a growing sense of despair had settled in. The women had boxes of bandages and over-the-counter antibiotic ointment, and they began responding to cries of help from people with broken bones and missing limbs.

A man whose wife was in labor came over and said, "You have to come."

"We kept saying we're not qualified, we're not qualified," said Graham. But the man insisted, and Graham, who has given birth twice, rose to the challenge.

"At least I've experienced it," Graham said. "I thought, 'I can do it.'"

Crowds of people needing emergency medical care had camped outside a hospital near the soccer field, but the building was damaged and the doctors and nurses had fled.

Graham found an empty delivery room and spread a blanket over a table caked with human remains and pulled out some surgical gloves and alcohol pads.

The mother was screaming, and the baby appeared breached. When the contractions came, Graham instructed the woman to yell out the one word she thought they could both understand: hallelujah.

Graham prayed that God would turn the baby's head around, and before long, a healthy baby girl emerged from the womb.

Before she knew it, she had delivered another baby, this time a boy. The beaming parents were so grateful, they asked her to name the child. She gave the boy the nameJudah.

Honored at home

The four women were able to fly home on a Hendrick Aviation aircraft. The Concord-based company, part of NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick's operation, loaned several planes to ferry Americans from Haiti to Fort Pierce, Fla.

At a Jan. 17 church service, Pastor Ron Lewis joked he would give Graham an obstetrics degree and thanked the women for their service.

"Thank you for being the message this morning," Lewis said. "Thank you for being the Gospel."

He then invited some Haitian Duke University students and parents of adopted Haitian children to the stage while the church members prayed and collected money they will send to the orphanage the Metty family is working with.

"The media cycle will pass," said Wayne Graham, Linda's husband, and the missionary pastor at the church. "It's the responsibility of people in general, churches and nonprofits to raise awareness for years to come."