A message and video from Abby & Tori, two amazing volunteers who spent several days at St. Damiens Hospital assisting the doctors while documenting their story.

It was really a facebook success story how we got linked up with APJ -- my Italian aunt introduced me to a filmmaker in NY. When I posted on my facebook status that we were looking for an organization to link up with in Haiti, he sent me the APJ link and e-mailed his friend Tao who e-mailed his friend at APJ. So we found a cheap flight to Santo Domingo, stayed with a boarding school friend there, and just to be sure we'd get over the border, we dressed up as nuns with scarves around our heads and holding rosary beads, and took a bus the next day to Port-au-Prince as "religiosas". We brought our film & still cameras thinking we could make a story there, and we also both speak French, so we knew we could do something, even though we had lots of doubtful people telling us we'd just be a burden, how dangerous it was, etc.

We arrived at St. Damien's at night, donated some medical supplies at the front desk, were shown our sleeping spot on the roof, and the next morning at 6am were awakened by the aftershock. We quickly got dressed and ran over to the hospital to see what we could do, and soon thereafter, we were translating for doctors who were frantically trying to work on hundreds of patients without much order at all. Then an Argentine nurse asked me to help her change a bandage on a patient, instructed me how to do it on my own, and Tori and I spent the rest of the day changing dressings with no previous nursing experience. Huge gaping holes in heads, spinal injuries, limbs falling apart... There were hardly any nurses there, so the ones who were there were busy in the OR & ER, which is why we had to take over the nursing duties and tend to the patients who were sprawled out all over the lawn and in the courtyards of the hospital. Cameras were left behind until the last few days when things settled down a bit.

The next days were spent mostly translating and assisting doctors as more nurses started to arrive. We talked to the people, listened to their stories, and tried to make them feel comfortable, telling them they were in good hands, and if we stumbled upon a severe case, we would pull a doctor over to see them right away.

You can view their video here.

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