Haitian President Rene Preval has said he does not know where he will be sleeping after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck his country Tuesday destroyed the National Palace, his home.
Preval is not the only president having trouble sleeping, however.
College President Jim Yong Kim, the global health pioneer who has worked in the devastated country, stayed up until 3 a.m. Thursday morning combing through photographs of the destruction in Haiti, he said in an interview with The Dartmouth. Kim and the Dartmouth community at large have already mounted responses to the disaster.
"I am so encouraged by the way that students, staff, faculty and others have stepped up, but there is a lot more to do," he said.
John Butterly, the executive director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, is organizing a team of surgeons, physicians, nurses and other medical professionals from DHMC to travel to Haiti as an emergency response team, Kim said in an e-mail to the entire Dartmouth community.
"We're trying to get them down as early as this weekend, and they will go down and work at Partners In Health sites," said Kim, referring to the nonprofit global-health organization he helped found.
There are many opportunities for members of the Dartmouth community who are not medical professionals to get involved in Haitian relief efforts, Kim said.
"I am telling students now to just donate as much as you can to good causes and of course, my favorite is Partners In Health," Kim said. "But I want students to be engaged. I think a really important thing is for students to educate themselves about Haiti."
Kim understood immediately after the disaster how difficult the process of rebuilding Haiti will be, he said. Even before the earthquake, experts reported that it would require more than $3 billion to rebuild basic services such as public heath infrastructure and education. The earthquake has at least doubled the country's financial needs, according to Kim.
"[Former College President] John Sloan Dickey said that the world's troubles are your troubles boy, this is the worst trouble in the world right now," he said. "The one country in the world that could least afford to have an earthquake had an earthquake."
Kim has been in close contact with Ophelia Dahl, Paul Farmer and other public heath colleagues at Partners in Health since the catastrophe. PIH has worked in Haiti for more than two decades, Kim said.
PIH clinics are particularly well-prepared to respond to the disaster because they already have an established infrastructure, allowing them to attend to local residents' urgent needs. The clinics themselves withstood the earthquake because its epicenter was southwest of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, while the clinics are northeast of the city, according to Kim.
"For those organizations who are coming in to do relief but who don't have any established infrastructure in Haiti, I think its going to be very difficult for them to operate," Kim said, citing instances of military planes full of supplies being turned away because there was no one at Haitian airports to unload them.
Although the PIH clinics are located outside of Port-au-Prince, they have been closely involved with the relief services in the capital and have established surgical sites in the city, Kim said. Several victims of the disaster have travelled to PIH clinics outside of Port-au-Prince in order to seek medical assistance.
"I can tell people that if they donate to PIH, more than 95 percent of their donations will go to earthquake relief," Kim said. "[PIH has] very low overhead."
The Tucker Foundation hosted a student forum on Thursday night at which students were invited to discuss their feelings, thoughts and ideas about the disaster in Haiti.
"We want to address the human element and try to find meaning in what has happened," Ibrahim Elshamy '09, student director of the Tucker Foundation, said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Students for Africa recommended that students make donations to Haiti in a campus-wide e-mail on Wednesday. Donations were the most immediate way the campus could collectively respond to the crisis while formulating other ways to aid victims, Sharon Muhwezi '11, president of Students for Africa, told The Dartmouth.
"I just encourage Dartmouth to continue being concerned and good, as they've already shown throughout this whole week," she said. "I think we're doing commendable work right now."
The College will also hold a community meeting to plan a response to the disaster on Jan. 17 at 6:30 p.m. in the Hopkins Center's Alumni Hall, according to Kim's e-mail.
Although Kim's primary focus over the past few years has been on projects in Rwanda, Lesotho and Peru, PIH is also heavily involved in Haiti.
"I have, basically, family members [in Haiti]," Kim said. "Paul Farmer is married to a Haitian woman, and Paul is essentially my brother. I feel this in my bones."
Kim has been discussing the possibility of a long-term collaboration between global health groups at Dartmouth and PIH since he took his office last July.
"The Board [of Trustees] wanted me to bring these concerns with me and, in doing so, help them get the entire Dartmouth community engaged in these kinds of issues and this is our opportunity," Kim said. "I would love to see our Dartmouth-Haiti response evolve into something more long term."
Kim said that he sees no conflict of interest between his close involvement with humanitarian issues such as the earthquake and his job as president of the College.
"I am president of Dartmouth College but I am also a human being," Kim said. "I don't think anyone expected me to come to the job of president of Dartmouth College and give up my humanity in doing so. My humanity dictates to me that I try to help and respond."
