Medical team volunteers from New Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Aiken, South Carolina had agreed to spend a week in Haiti after the devastating earthquake

– not knowing the logistical issues and the danger they might face. And after that week of long days treating patients under difficult conditions, “the hardest part was to leave,” said retired nurse Trig Penland. “We would have liked to see the treatment completed.”

They arrived home last Friday, greeted warmly by relatives and church members – most of them having slept little or not at all in the previous 40 hours.

Penland was joined by Aiken Regional Medical Centers nurse Beth Kekacs, former nurse Donna Cook, Medical College of Georgia nurse Sarah Morris and Karen Eberl, a physical therapist.

They were accompanied by Associate Pastor Shaun Spencer; Penland’s husband, Richard; translator Alred Remy of Atlanta; and two doctors, including Orangeburg physician Casey McMillan.

Even before the team members left, they were overwhelmed by the generosity of Aiken County residents. They carried with them 22 duffel bags of donated medical supplies.

After flights from Atlanta and Miami to the Dominican Republic, they found themselves at the border to Haiti but couldn’t get clearance for the vehicle in which they were travelling. They walked, carrying their personal belongings and medical supplies, across the border and rode on another truck to an area near Port-au-Prince.

The decision was soon made that the group would go on the next day to Les Cayes to make contact with El Shaddai Ministries, which has enjoyed a collaboration with New Covenant for several years. They found their way to a general hospital that first day.

“It was a circus, unreal,” said Morris in a recent interview. “The beds were lined up against the walls, and the smell was horrendous. We didn’t see any type of staff, and some nurses turned out to be nursing students. One doctor was so overwhelmed, and we couldn’t get organized enough even for triage.”

Eberl and Penland spent that day in the emergency room, where many patients were on stretchers. Again, they found a doctor in shutdown mode. Eberl recalls vividly a 6-year-old girl, who had a deep wound to her ankle.

“The little girl was scared, and we didn’t have supplies yet,” she said. “We did dress her wound and gave her a tetanus shot. At least, we were hoping it was tetanus. We just had to do the best we could with the supplies we had at that moment.”

The nurses tried to get the hospital as organized as possible before they left for another facility, which a Haitian director and an American doctor had set up far more efficiently. But the needs of patients were still acute. Eberl, Cook and Penland worked mostly with adults and children with crush injuries, open wounds and fractures.

“We gained some confidence during the week,” Penland said. “It felt hopeless at first, but as the patients were treated, we could see some of them being spiritually and physically healed.”

This mission was a team effort, not just from its members in Haiti, but those praying for them and formally supporting their efforts in Aiken and elsewhere, Spencer said. They saw the terrible effect of nature in a land unprepared for it – the parents who lost four of their five children and one man who was the only survivor in a building that had fallen on him and eight others.

“People have experienced so much there,” Spencer said. “Poverty has been going on for a long time. Yet we could still see little glimmers of hope, people trying to establish something more than existence with their hope in Jesus, and that he’s doing something bigger with their country.”

Cook and Morris spoke to the New Covenant congregation during Sunday’s service, and their comments can be found on the church website, www.ncpaiken.org, under the “sermons” link. Cook talked about the experience of being on a team in a spiritual context.

“I saw the Lord as our team leader,” she said. “We could not have done what we did without those who gave financially, those who transported us, fixed meals and got us supplies …”

Morris, too, found their departure difficult, knowing they were leaving patients that she was fairly certain would not make it. But she also thinks about a woman with broken bones who, like many others, was in dreadful pain. The hospital had no X-ray equipment, so Morris and McMillan lifted her into a church van to take her to another facility. The round trip took more than two hours.

“God opened up to me how blessed we are,” Morris said. “We had no translator and so I said Jesus and God a lot. We gave her enough money to buy groceries. God singled me out to minister to that lady.”

New Covenant had scheduled a youth group mission to Haiti next summer, and that trip is still planned. Church officials are already discussing another trip to assist with relief efforts.

Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the on-line edition of the Aiken (SC) Standard on February 3, 2009 and is used with permission.