Aid workers under stress: "I don't even have time to cry" (Feature)

By Andrea Soca Cabrios Jan 27, 2010, 1:08 GMT

Port-au-Prince - For days, rescue workers and doctors who deal with the victims of the devastating quake in Haiti have seen dead bodies as well as many seriously injured and generally desperate people.

Some - generally the most experienced - can set their emotions aside and keep going. Others cry alone, when they get a break.

'I saw many things that I had never seen in my life,' says French aid worker Maeva Gonzalez, of the organization Amities du Coeur. 'I sometimes feel like crying, but I don't cry because these people are living worse things than us.'

Thousands of representatives of non-governmental organizations and international aid agencies travelled to Haiti in the wake of the January 12 quake, which is confirmed at 150,000 and still climbinig.

They sleep in tents, away from their families and under permanent stress over neverending work and over the individual dramas of the Haitians they meet.

'I don't even have time to cry or anything. You're in a lot of action, we take the injured to doctors. You keep your things to yourself and you grin and bear it,' says Gonzalez, 25.

Argenis Sanchez, 28, a Dominican working with the group Rescate Ambar, has been driving patients to hospitals in ambulances for over a week. He speaks no Creole or French. He feels frustrated because he cannot communicate with Haitians other than through gestures.

'The truth is I haven't really felt the stress yet,' Sanchez says.

However, he is only referring to physical exhaustion, because he admits to having shed a few tears.

'I have withdrawn twice to cry somewhere else, where people don't see me. I feel very powerless. You give more than you have,' Sanchez explains.

His mother lives in Haiti. She would have died in the quake, had it not been for a Haitian who pushed her and saved her life, while the saviour himself died.

'That is the reason I came over: to give back to them what they did for my mother,' he says.

Of the hundreds of organizations active in the Caribbean country, not all have experience in disasters of a similar magnitude to Haiti's, which left thousands buried in the rubble, 500,000 living in camps and 130,000-200,000 otherwise displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and UNICEF are better prepared to deal with dramatic situations than smaller organizations that try to help with good will alone.

'Many are untrained. They are beginners and they are fragile and they cannot cope with the situation. Aid workers often need help,' says Greece's Iro Varsani of Medecins Du Monde (Doctors of the World).

'When something like that happens, that person has to go back home. But it does not often happen with doctors. It happens more among people who are not health professionals: they suffer from tension, melancholy, they get aggressive in the relationship with their colleagues,' Varsani explains.

Varsani knows what she is talking about. She is 65 and has been working in disasters for 20 years. She worked in quakes in India, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. She took care of the injured during the 1990 Gulf War.

'I used to cry. I no longer do, except when I have to see children,' she says.

Generally, aid workers are on their own, although there are a few religious and secular organizations that travel to disaster areas to provide support for rescue personnel.

And even the most experienced people need time to get over what they see in each mission.

'You think and dream about it, you talk to yourself about it, you carry the tragedy, the people, the memories as a load,' Varsani admits.

Her first mission was in the Gulf War in Iraq. She worked at a hospital for a month.

'When I got back it was very difficult for me. I was absent for my family, I felt guilty because I had abandoned (the Iraqis). You build very deep relationships,' she says.

'You go back home, you return to your good life, but you leave them there,' she says of disaster victims. 'You very often feel guilty when you leave the place. But it no longer affects me like it did the first time.'