The local paper had a story Friday about Enoch Choi, a physician who wanted to help out in Haiti, who wanted to bring a medical team as well as himself there, but, he said, the major relief organizations wanted a month’s commitment and most doctors and nurses he knew just couldn’t take that much time off.
So he worked out on his own a way to get rotating teams of his local colleagues in and out for a week each month. His church, Abundant Life Christian, helped with the logistics as he was setting things up; even the local schoolchildren helped with the fundraising.
He was in the first group to go. They’re back now, and were giving a discussion on their experiences the other night. They described:
The group of patients on IVs, very ill, who surprised their caregivers when they broke out into song: a hymn, “How Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”
The baby near death of dehydration and pneumonia, who, given care, one doctor said, “It was like watching a flower bloom in time-lapse photography.” What was left unsaid was the unfathomable gift of being allowed to know they had saved a life–which, one by one, happened many times over.
The young mother, an amputee crushed in spirit, for whom they were able to reframe her situation: she had rushed back into a building to save her two-year-old. One doctor said, “I told her she was a hero for rescuing her child; her life was made in that moment: that she would forever be a hero. I was able to help her interpret that.”
I love that. The ability to see the power in our stories helps make us whole, and the gift of that physician seeing the whole picture, and giving it to that mother, changed everything.  For her and him both.
The sum of their thoughts was, Haiti is a place of hope, and that hope will save them in the end.
When I was a patient last year and very ill, I had a kind, calm doctor taking part in my care, the kind of man where you instinctively know you’re in good and caring hands and that, no matter how hard it is right now, you’re going to come out of this okay.
And his name was Enoch Choi.