We Will Not Abandon Haiti

After licking our wounds from the devastating news halting our medical mission trip, our team will press on. We will not abandon Haiti. I am sharing a note from our mission team’s leader, Dr. Tony Coletta, below:

“I’m at the gate in Port au Prince with Martina, Cal and Tim and we are on our way back to the United States. With all that has happened, and in coming to the very difficult decision to once again cancel the Blue Sky team’s travel today, while I was receiving a text from Dr. Peter thanking us for everything we did and were planning to do for his patients in Haiti, I got a call from Pierre Dilus, thanking us as well, and making sure we knew that he and his people needed us. Simultaneously our entire team, and those who have traveled before us and those who will travel with us in the future were receiving the same message. Please don’t abandon Haiti. And we won’t. Too many others, leaders and nations included, have contributed to Haiti’s tragic history by abandonment. We won’t be a party to that. Some day, when safe conditions endure, we will be back.

A few pictures to close the loop. Children in uniform outside the clinic, a young Haitian woman who had a severe gastritis when I saw her in November for who we secured meds in the US, treated her (thanks to my good GI friend back home Dr. Harvey Guttman giving his clinical advice), who returned to see me veritably cured, a very handsome father and son duo who told me that would wait for our return, and me and my clinic nurse Germana, who works magic in the clinic with her patients.

Thanks to you all. Tony”