Hank Asher: Philanthropist on the Ground in Haiti

After the earthquake in Haiti last week, South Florida business man and philanthropist Hank Asher donated the use of his private aircraft for medical relief flights. Throughout the course of this past week, his pilots have flown multiple missions to Haiti, bringing much-needed medical supplies, Project Medishare doctors and staff to the devastated nation and wounded victims back to the United States for medical care.

Earlier this week, Hank Asher traveled to Haiti. This is his first-hand account of the devastation and need in Haiti.
Credit: Susan R. Miller, The South Florida Business Journal’s Giving Guide Blog:

“You’ve all seen what’s on the news. What you don’t see is the 360-degree view of devastation. It looks like an atomic bomb went off in Port-au-Prince.

High-rises collapsed with no possibility of survivors. The stench of those who died doesn’t wash out of your nostrils. Whole hillsides of buildings and homes are gone – leaving just the back walls that were built into the mountains, and part of what used to be the floors. Too many electric lines are down to restore electricity for a very long time. There was another aftershock Sunday night while we were there.

I spent most of my time in makeshift tent hospitals. University of Miami/Jackson Memorial – Project Medishare – had the largest tent hospital, followed by the Israeli military tent hospital.

The UM team includes retired Col. Ron Bogue, one of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s right-hand men in Operation Desert Storm, Dr. Barth Green, and Pascal Goldschmidt, the dean of University of Miami School of Medicine.

The work is grueling. Doctors desperately need ICU units; CT cameras; X-ray, dialysis and sonogram machines; and containerized operating rooms.

Project Medishare is accepting patients as fast as they come, patching up the non-critical and sending them home – more accurately back to the street.

IsraAid, a coordinating body of Israeli and Jewish organizations, had a mob scene on the road, which they were handling well. They are able to triage. The critical are taken in, the non-critical have to be turned away.

It wasn’t hard for me to get in. One “shalom” and they shook my hand, hugged me and brought me to Dr. Iky Ginsberg from the University of Miami, who was working with them. Unlike the UM docs, the Israeli docs have guns.

Project Medishare is almost ready to move into four enormous air-conditioned new tents that they just constructed.

Hopefully, International Medical Surgical Response Team (IMSuRT) will join forces with them and locate on Medishare’s massive property and new facility on Port-au-Prince airport grounds.

I met the president and first lady of Haiti at the Medishare tent hospital and at the new Medishare massive site. The patients were so touched that they were visiting them.

There were so many cargo planes and soldiers flown in yesterday that the airport looked like a war zone. Mostly it was U.S. military, but there were many from Canada and from as far as Czechoslovakia, Finland, Ecuador, Brazil and Russia.

The humanity of so many countries coming to the aid of Haiti is such a beautiful message – compared to the psychotic wars and unrest in other parts of the world.

Coordination is what is lacking now.

Water and food is arriving, but it’s not being distributed. There’s not enough for the doctors and patients. The Haitian people are sleeping outside because they are scared to return to their homes or buildings. Thousands sleep in public parks, on the sides of and on rubble-filled highways and streets.

Hopefully our military, IMSuRT, Medishare, IsraAid and others can coordinate efforts and build a real hospital on the new Medishare site. It would save tens of thousands of lives.

The Florida/U.S. rescue teams that are there are digging people out and delivering them to tent hospitals 24/7 – amazing people.

Our plane has flown more than 100 surgeons to Haiti and dozens of patients back to the U.S.

We need a bigger airplane that can hold more than 11 surgeons making two daily flights to Port-au-Prince.

The doctors, rescuers and medical support personnel are ready to go. We just can’t get them there 11 at a time.”

SOURCE: The South Florida Business Journal Giving Guide Blog