The numbers are staggering. In the span of a week, Bonnie Clair, MSN, RN, and a group of 25 other healthcare professionals saw 2,196 patients and gave out 6,500 prescriptions. “Yes, we were very busy,” she says.

Clair, the retention project manager at Cox Health in Springfield, MO, went on a medical mission trip to Haiti for a week in March. It was seven days she’ll never forget. After a few weeks of letting the experience sink in, she candidly shared her thoughts, images, and memories with us. Her story, in three parts, will appear on our site this week. Find Part I here. Here’s Part II, the trip:

What did you miss most about being away from home?
You miss your family. I know. It sounds so cliché.

Where did you call home when you were in Haiti?
The place we stayed was called Love a Child. I knew we were going to be joining forces with an orphanage, but I didn’t know we were going to be staying there. It was very cool.

How were the conditions?
It was amazing where we were. Haiti is so poverty stricken. Abject poverty. And then you drive into the Love A Child Village and it’s about 100 acres that are absolutely beautiful. The orphanage they have built there is exquisite. Some of the kids have come from horrendous things we cannot even imagine and they get to live there … it is awesome! Love A Child also has a school on their property. There is no such thing as public school in Haiti, but more than 300 kids get to attend school there everyday. They all wear yellow shirts and blue shorts/skirts.

It still must have taken some getting used to.
Well it IS a very different world. We could drink the water on the village compound, but we had to use water purification tablets otherwise. All day the team would be out without running water, so when we came back to the village compound in the evening, all 11 women [in my room] were happy to see one toilet that flushed.

In nursing terms, what did you spend your time doing?
The first day was spent in the warehouse, bagging up all the meds into individual prescriptions. There was cough syrup to be poured into prescription bottles, worm medication, antihypertensive medication, vitamins … everything came in huge containers, so we had to sort them out. We traveled up into the mountains [of Elastik] with quite a caravan where there was a cinder block church. That’s where we set up the first mobile clinic.

So that’s where you went every day?
No. Every day after that, we set up clinic in the Love a Child village. There’s also a church there, and that’s where we set up the triage area. We had the pharmacy and the dentist [who saw more than 200 patients and pulled 205 teeth] set up in the brand new clinic. On Wednesday, we dedicated the clinic called The Jesus Healing Center and officially opened it. What an awesome experience that was … there were hundreds of Haitian people who walked for hours (days?) to be there. The people in the villages and mountains find out about free medical clinics through solar powered radios (see photo).

What was your main responsibility?
I worked in triage with an interpreter. My job was to find out what each patient’s primary complaint was, take vital signs, and send them to the appropriate physician/nurse practitioner/dentist. Sometimes it was very challenging to ascertain exactly what the primary complaint was. In the photo it seems like I am trying to clarify with the interpreter, “What did she say?!”

What one image stands out from your time in Haiti?
On the last day we were there, we went to visit a little village called Le Tant. That was the pivotal moment for me. The clinics all week were what I had anticipated and the overwhelming poverty was what I expected. But after we walked through that village, I just stood there and cried. They have nothing. I mean nothing. So much of the disease they have is completely preventable. There were animal feces all over the ground; most of the kids had bare feet and that’s how they pick up hookworms and parasites. In addition to the lack of nutrition, worms cause tremendous malnutrition and anemia. They enter the body, travel into the circulatory system and eventually migrate into the GI tract where they feed from the host; this also causes loss of protein. In a region where malnutrition is already ravaging people, this is catastrophic. And to know its just basic hygiene principles that could prevent it is an almost overpowering realization. It’s like walking into a National Geographic picture. It was truly overwhelming.

That must have really put things in perspective pretty quickly.
It totally did. We hardly realize how much we have here in the States.

What was the hardest thing about leaving?
Feeling like there was so much more to do.

Editor’s Note: Did you miss Part I of Bonnie’s trip? Check it out here. For the third and final section, be sure to check back on Friday.