Read Markley's previous dispatch.
On Thursday afternoon a man was shot three times during a robbery attempt: once in the abdomen and twice in the leg. It was the second shooting in two days. This time, the man was a friend of my host, Joe Peterkin.
People in Roatan know that ambulance service is spotty. The island's one ambulance runs out of its one fire station. The wounded man's friends called Peterkin rather than call for an ambulance. Peterkin is a retired American paramedic; his wife is a retired nurse. Peterkin instructed the man's friends to bring him to his house and phoned for the ambulance to meet them there. This made sense because Peterkin's house is between where the man was wounded and the hospital.
At Peterkin's house, they stabilized the man as best they could and waited for the ambulance. And they waited, and waited and waited. They waited nearly 30 minutes. They loaded the wounded man in the ambulance and set out for the hospital. Peterkin followed in a private vehicle. The ambulance plodded along the two-lane road that serves as the island's main artery at about 10 mph.
The ambulance's back suspension is so shot that even the smoothest road feels crater pocked--I made one ambulance call with the fire department earlier in the week. This was as fast as the ambulance could safely go. Frustrated, Peterkin moved his injured friend to his vehicle and drove to the hospital. Had he done this from the start they probably could have delivered the patient 45 minutes sooner, which was a greater frustration.
This incident prompted Roatan City Councilman Leland Woods, who also serves as fire commissioner, to ask one of the cruise ship companies to donate another ambulance. The company agreed to do so and set the cost ceiling at $100,000. Peterkin and Woods are exploring if they can get two smaller ambulances for the same price and be able to leave one at the fire station and one at the other end of the island.
What's been more amazing than the lack of resources and training on Roatan has been the outpouring of generosity. If the cruise ship company makes good on its offer, that will be extremely generous. And not to diminish that generosity, the company has a vested interest in its guests being cared for at one of its ports of call.
More impressive has been the generosity of those on the island. Peterkin, for example, opened his home to me and arranged for free accommodations for the other International Fire Relief Mission team members. Woods donated food for some of our meals and made sure the team had a free rental car. The Pelican Tree resort is donating a meeting room for the weeklong EMS training that IFRM will conduct. A nearby auto junk and repair yard donated a car for the firefighters to practice extrication.
Back home, companies like GearGrid and Rosenbauer have provided the equipment and money IFRM needs to make these firefighters safer.
There's a flood of generosity pouring into Haiti to relieve the suffering from its earthquake; one of the doctors I met here had just come off 10 days in Haiti. Haiti was devastated and desperately needs immediate help.
Roatan has not been devastated, yet still needs immediate help. But where tragic events such as that in Haiti bring sympathy, the constant dysfunction in places like Roatan, and I suspect in Haiti before the earthquake, brings frustration. This frustration wears on people; it erodes their desire to help. The local leaders and residents need to take the steps they can to help themselves. But they don't, or at least not at the pace needed or expected by those from developed countries.
It is hard to keep caring and keep trying, and yet, some very generous people do. It is their generosity that left a marked impression on me; I can only hope that it will have some impact. I hope that IFRM's efforts will make firefighters safer and better capable to protect their civilians. There is always room for improvement, but given the resources available, IFRM did all it could to boost the island's response capabilities.
After IFRM's two-week stint, it will fall to local officials to improve their fire and EMS service. And likely, it will fall to those committed individuals living in Roatan to keep the pressure on those officials and to keep donating their time and resources to improving the situation.
