Local doc back from Haiti

Back from Haiti for less than a week, Dr. Richard Nauheim recently experienced culture shock in the Long Island communities where he has lived and worked all his life. For the ophthalmologist with a practice in Merrick, spending four days on a mission to the tiny, impoverished nation changed the way he sees his familiar surroundings.

From the moment his flight landed in Port-au-Prince, site of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that rocked the country in January, causing massive destruction, Nauheim knew the disaster was worse than he could have grasped by reading about it or watching the TV news from the comfort of his home.

"To come back here, you go through reverse culture shock," Nauheim said, thinking back on the starving and needy people he left behind. "You go to Pathmark and you cry because there's so much food."

Joined by 11 other doctors on a humanitarian mission organized by the nonprofit organization New Reality International, Nauheim said he was overcome by the unbearable heat in Haiti, and he worked in constant fear. His plane landed amid a sea of overcrowded tents where diseases like tuberculosis and malaria were spreading among desperately hungry people. His mind, he said, wandered frequently. He thought of four Americans who had been killed only days before his arrival, and of a nearby prison that had been obliterated in the disaster. Security guards guided Nauheim and his fellow doctors to a dilapidated school bus, which took them on an hour-and-a-half drive to the Haitian border town of Fonds Parisian.

The doctors, traveling with whatever medications and equipment they could carry, turned a church and an empty building surrounded by a stone wall into a temporary home and work space. They slept on the porch the first night to escape the heat, under the protection of malaria tents to safeguard them from mosquitos, and awoke to a crowd of hundreds of Haitians waiting outside the wall.

"There were Haitians in the church, praying and chanting that they'd be seen," Nauheim said. The doctors treated an average of 300 patients each day, but were unable to see everyone who came.

Nauheim said he was touched by the stories of the people he met -- a young medical student who was blinded in one eye in the quake; three young boys whose spirits he lifted with a simple gift of stickers. "We gave them Disney stickers, and you'd have thought we gave them the world," he said.

After four days, Nauheim was exhausted, dirty and suffering the side effects of a diet of nothing but canned food.

When he first landed in Haiti, he said, he wished he could turn around and come home. Now that he is home, his thoughts often return to Haiti, and he said he plans to return.

To learn more about New Reality International, visit www.newrealityinternational.org.

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