Helping in Haiti

Larry Feeler flew into Haiti not knowing what to expect. As his plane got closer to the ground, he saw something unusual dot the lush green and mountainous landscape. Feeler realized that the blue colors interspersed across the outskirts of Port-au-Prince belonged to the tarps of tent cities where the Haitian people were living.

“That’s going to stick in my mind,” Feeler said. “It’s unbelievable. I thought everything’s stable, everything’s great. But there are thousands of tents with tarps, and that’s where people live. They don’t have plumbing or running water. I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s so devastating. I was totally in shock that things weren’t under control, that they still have so much that they need.”

Feeler, founder of Odessa Physical Therapy, went to Haiti in June for eight days with his daughter, Rachel Feeler, to help patients learn to walk with prosthetics as well as assisting with open wounds, burns and amputations.

“My daughter’s a nurse, and she went there in February. She was telling me they needed a physical therapist there, so we made a plan to go,” Feeler said. “She kind of inspired me after her first trip there.”

Six months after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the island nation, Feeler saw many patients still reeling from the effects while he was working in the Mission of Hope Hospital just outside of Port-au-Prince.

“I had one lady come in whose arm was still broken from the earthquake,” Feeler said. “I had another lady who got burned with car battery acid and it had been 21 days with her arms, chest and face burned.”

Rachel Feeler, a nurse at Austin’s University Medical Center Brackenridge, went to Haiti for the first time just one month after the earthquake.

“The first time that I went it was really shocking,” Rachel Feeler said. “It was mad chaos after the earthquake. People had tried to set broken bones and move on, so they would come in with bones still broken that hadn’t been fixed. People had open wounds that were still infected. Lots of people needed surgery.”

“The first time we went, we had fresh amputees or they needed to be amputated. Or they had a broken bone that didn’t heal that needed to be amputated,” she said. “The second time I went, we had a lot that needed prosthetics.”

Although many people still needed help the second time she visited, Rachel Feeler said they had better supplies in her June trip.

“The conditions were a lot different,” she said. “It was a lot more primitive the first time we went. There was no electricity, people just stood out in the streets because there was nowhere for them to stay. It was total devastation. The first time we had mattresses laid out in the school, and that was the hospital. The second time, they built a mass tent, and it had actual hospital beds.”

About 70 patients came to Mission of Hope every day, some of them repeat visitors, Rachel Feeler said.

“On the foothills of the mountains, there are little villages of groups of people that live outside the city,” Larry Feeler said. “They might walk five miles just to get to our clinic, or they ride a tap-tap (cab).”

Once the people reach the clinic, which was on top of a small hill, they would sing hymns in the morning as the waited for their doctors, Larry Feeler said.

“There were so many people that we saw. They’re very motivated, very gracious people,” Larry Feeler said. “One of my favorite patients was a little lady. Her name was Charls and all of her fingers were amputated, and she would just crochet with her wrists.”

“It makes you realize how silly we are to worry about our iPhone or what restaurant we’re going to eat at. It makes you appreciate how spoiled we are because we have so much, and there’s so many people with so little,” Larry Feeler said. “I felt like we made a huge difference. We actually helped people learn how to walk so they could go home and survive, because if you don’t have legs in Haiti, you can’t survive.”

“You can help so many people, but there’s so much more to be done,” he said. “It was definitely a life-changing experience.”

FACT FILE

Who is Larry Feeler?

>> Owns: Odessa Physical Therapy

>> Involved in: Physical Therapy for more than 30 years. Feeler worked at Medical Center Hospital from 1977 to 1982 as the director of physical therapy.

>> Lived in Odessa: 56 years.