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Craig Family Lands in Haiti

After two weeks of fruitlessly searching for seats on commercial flights, small missionary planes and even cruise ships, Peter and Sara Craig finally landed seats on a private personal jet and touched down safely in Haiti on Saturday.

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Peter Craig and his son Abram pose during their flight to Haiti on Saturday on a private jet owned by the founder of The Wheelchair Foundation. “We might have been the only people flying into Haiti this weekend on a leather couch,” Peter wrote on the family’s blog.

The W.F. West graduates and their two young sons have now begun what they believe will be a years-long effort to bring safe, clean drinking water to the people of this ravaged country through a Christian group called Clean Water for Haiti.

“Our first job here will be learning Creole,” Peter Craig told The Chronicle by e-mail on Sunday. “Beyond that, we’ll be helping with projects and work around the base when we can and learning more about all of the things Clean Water for Haiti does.”

The Craigs were on their way to Florida for a connecting flight to the island nation when the Jan. 12 earthquake hit. They flew back to Portland and have been vainly looking for transportation ever since.

They found success on a plane connected with a charity called The Wheelchair Foundation, which has delivered nearly 1 million wheelchairs around the world.

After learning that they would be able to catch a ride to Haiti with the group, they were surprised to discover that they would be flying not on a cargo plane, but on the founder’s private jet.

In a blog post, Sara Craig credited divine help with connecting them with the group.

“After all of the time we spent making phone calls and sending e-mails to different organizations and getting nowhere, all I can say is I did not make this happen. It was definitely someone bigger than me coordinating all of this,” Sara wrote on the family’s blog,

ourordinaryjourney.blogspot.com.

As they drove from the airport, the Craigs were struck by how many people have been left homeless by the quake and its aftershocks.

Aid groups have been giving out tents, and citizens have been pitching them in any open space they can find.

“Look at the median the next time you are merging onto the freeway and imagine seeing hundreds of people camping there waiting for who knows what,” Peter wrote.

The Craigs are now at their new home in a town about 50 miles north of Port-au-Prince. While the country is struggling, the Craigs said they are blessed with enough food to eat, lodgings undamaged by the earthquake, and a compound electrified by solar and generator power 24 hours a day.

They hope to aid and expand the work of a group that employs Haitians in building and selling simple concrete devices that filter drinking water using bio-sand.

“As we begin this new chapter in our lives, we are overwhelmed by how many things we have to be thankful for,” Peter wrote, “and this is only the beginning.”

SOURCE: Chronline

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Despite recession, locals reach out to Haiti

RICHMOND, CA (KGO) — People all over the Bay Area are doing what they can to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Despite the recession, donations are still pouring in from adults and young people as well.

The Wheelchair Foundation of Danville went beyond its original mission to provide 2,000 wheelchairs for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. It flew in eight tons of medical supplies along with 50 doctors and nurses who gave badly needed surgery to people dying from blood infections caused by blunt trauma.

“We had a couple stay. They didn’t want to come back. You just get so wrapped up and so involved in helping these people and you get so much out of it, you kind of forget about time,” said Jeff Behring with The Wheelchair Foundation.

The foundation is gearing up to deliver another round of supplies and medical aid. The images that Behring witnessed are compelling other groups to go beyond their own means to help.In Richmond, a city that often finds itself in need, people are coming out to give what they can.

Students involved with Richmond’s Police Athletic Club are holding a charity basketball tournament featuring semi-pro teams like the San Francisco Rumble and the Compton Cobras.

“A lot of the kids out here are going through some hard times,” said student organizer Gina Saechao.

Saechao says their own pain is helping fuel the effort to put on this six-day tournament and raise $50,000 for the Red Cross.

“Just because we’re disadvantaged it doesn’t mean that we don’t care,” she said.

“There is yet hope. It’s never too small to dream big,” said basketball charity supporter Richard Foster.

SOURCE: ABC 7 KGO-San Francisco

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Valley Medical Workers Return from Haiti

A group of Valley medical workers is back home after spending four days in Haiti, where they delivered 6,000 pounds of medical supplies and provided aid to people of the devastated country.

The three nurses and one doctor from Selma Community Hospital were part of a mission called “Plane to Haiti,” sponsored by The Wheelchair Foundation.

Wheelchairs are in great need because so many people have had to undergo amputations following a 7.0 earthquake.

The group of nurses said they wanted to help so badly when they reached Haiti but didn’t know where to start. Nurse Jennifer Tarazon said, “It almost at times seemed hopeless because you think, how are they going to recover from this, there’s just so much devastation.”

With no secure building to work in, Nurse Tamara Bryan says they took matters into their own hands. Tamara said, “By the second or third day, we said here’s a field, let’s put a tent up, we made friends with some locals and they said we’ll bring people to you.”

Amazingly, they operated a clinic with no running water. Tamara said, “You just pump hand sanitizer and just put on a new pair of gloves and create equipment with whatever you can and make it happen.”

Nurse Tim Miller remembers a hectic situation in the tent where they were treating about 20 patients at once. Miller said, “You’re running around putting IV and antibiotics in every single one of them.”

Then in came a little boy who could hardly breathe. Miller said, “You’re like, they should be going straight to ICU, but here you are with 20 patients and you have to take care of him too and it’s awesome when they wake up in the morning, look at you and smile and they’re still alive. That feels good.

Jennifer Tarazon’s most memorable moment happened at the university of Miami Medical Center tent. It was sad, yet uplifting. Jennifer said, “There were kids there with no arms, no legs or waiting or their amputation surgery, but they were still smiling, still beautiful and you would give them their medicine or little cookie and they would say merci and it was just very touching.”

The wheelchair foundation plans to deliver 5,000 more wheelchairs to Haiti. These nurses, as well as co-workers at Selma Community Hospital, are planning to take another trip there to help as soon as they are able to raise enough money to pay for the trip.

SOURCE: CBS 47 Fresno

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Medical Team Returns from Haiti

Fresno – A group of Valley residents saw firsthand the devastation and destruction in Port–Au–Prince, Haiti.

The team of doctors and nurses and support staff was in Haiti for a week, delivering medical supplies and treating patients. The Wheelchair Foundation flew them there, on a private plane. 

They describe what they saw as a war zone.

“From the moment we hit the ground, we were being escorted by the air force out of our plane, we were unable to leave airfields, sleeping on benches. People with machine guns walking with us from the hospital tent to where the x–rays are,” said Dr. Joaquin Arambula of his experience. 

They say the sick and wounded lined up to get treated in a tent. 

The group also delivered a batch of wheelchairs. 

“Wheelchair foundation is bringing about 5,000 over there. Of that 5,000 we brought 50, and just the 50 we brought, they were gold,” said Thomas Miller, a former Army medic who traveled with the group. 

He says the group had to be picky about who was given a wheelchair. 

One man who received one was paralyzed, and couldn’t move the entire right side of his body. 

“I found myself picking up and carrying him to his wheelchair and kissing him on his forehead because I was so touched.  Here’s a man who wasn’t able to move for 15 days.  The fact we were able to give him a wheelchair and some sense of normalcy. The most touching situation I’ve ever dealt with in medicine,” said Dr. Arambula. 

And despite the difficult conditions, this group says, they would gladly do it all over again. 

“In the near future, if they asked us, I’m sure all of us would jump at the opportunity to go,” said Miller. 

SOURCE: FOX 16 KMPH-Fresno

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Selma Medical Team Share Stories of Haiti

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — A medical team from Selma just flew home from Port-au-Prince after volunteering there for the last week. This team is made up of three nurses, one doctor and a former army medic.

They’ve all seen gun shots, stabbings and assaults before but nothing prepared them for what they encountered once they got to their destination.

Inside Dr. Joaquin Arambula’s iPhone are 5 days worth of photos chronicling the mass destruction in Haiti and the affects on its inhabitants. “It’s going to take more than two days, two weeks, two years to fix the structures and issues that they are going to have,” he said.

Sunday afternoon Dr. Arambula and fellow nurses Jennifer Tarazon, Tamara Bryan and Tim Miller met in Northwest Fresno to wind down and reflect on what they saw in Port-au-Prince.

“We had a floor of 75 kids that were either amputations, waiting for amputations, dehydration and they actually had a death from tetanus,” said Tarazon.

Bryan added: “Things are in boxes laying around and the supplies you have to work with are far and few. You have to just rig things together and make your own equipment.”

“There’s no way this country will be anywhere near [where] it was, which it is still behind, in 30 years,” said Thomas Miller a former Army medic.

Miller said there was too much red tape keeping them from doing their jobs effectively. “I think there needs to be a non-government group that in some way creates a liaison that can somehow filter the right people to the right places,” he said.

The few times they were able to venture out they were under constant military guard.

“God bless our troops, those guys. Talk about the professionalism. Everything was amazing. We couldn’t have gone anywhere without them,” said Miller.

This group, which managed to survive off of 8 hours of sleep, said the memories of the children they met will stay with them forever.

“You’re taking care of a child and she’s trying to hug you and she only has one arm and you want to cry but she’s smiling and she’s laughing and she’s just thankful that you’re there,” said Tarazon:

“They need help. They need a lot of help. I would go back in a heart beat. Without even thinking twice about it,” said Bryan.

This group was able to donate 50 wheelchairs to people in need through the Wheelchair Foundation. They want to go back but they have to raise the money first… they say it costs thousands of dollars to ship supplies and themselves into the disaster area.

SOURCE: ABC 30 KFSN-Fresno

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