By Matthew Fleishman, Yardley News Editor

While a 7.0 magnitude earthquake may have destroyed buildings and caused massive casualties in Haiti, people like Kevin Treiber, of Lower Makefield Township, are the ones who rush in to save lives and make sure that the human spirit is not also lost in the devastation.

Treiber, who served as a U.S. Army medic during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, flew to Haiti on Wednesday, Jan. 13 as part of the 35-person New Jersey Disaster Medical Assistance Team, which treated thousands of Haitians during their two-week mission, sometimes seeing more than 600 people in one day.

“We would go out on foot patrol with the 82nd Airborne looking for ‘tent cities’ to treat as many people as we could,” said Treiber. “Much of what we treated was part of the second wave of injuries. The first wave was from the initial damage from buildings collapsing, but we saw a lot of the second wave, which was infection, because people would bandage their wounds but then leave them on for days at a time.”

On foot patrol, Treiber’s unit would have to search through rubble for wounded people to treat, so the worst thing he could see was “USAR-NL” painted on the remains of a building.

“That meant ‘Urban Search and Rescue – No Living,’” said Treiber. “I didn’t need to go in to see for myself. You could smell it in the air.”

While they did go out on foot patrol, Treiber’s unit did not have to travel far to find injuries to treat, as the unit slept on a tennis court at a country club in Petion-Ville, while more than 50,000 people created a refugee camp on the club’s golf course.

“They were just looking for any open space away from the destruction of buildings,” said Treiber. “I asked one of the guys from the 82nd Airborne how this compared to Iraq, and he said Iraq was in better shape.”

Treiber said that on the golf course, there were more people than the medicine, food and water his team had available to hand out.

“There was just a sea of people waiting in line,” said Treiber. “We didn’t have enough morphine to give to these people, so we were handing out Motrin and Tylenol to handle the pain from fractures. After they got medicine, they went to the back of the next line to get food and water.”

Even though devastation and destruction were everywhere, Treiber was amazed at the spirit of the Haitian people.

“These people are survivalists,” said Treiber. “Never have I seen so many people do so much with so little. AT&T cell phones worked down there, so people were rigging batteries from destroyed cars to power cell phone chargers so they could contact their loved ones. I would have never thought to do something like that. That’s their resourcefulness. These people were cooking in their tents and doing laundry. They simply moved from their home to their tent, and life went on for many of them.”

Despite having seen the destruction of Mother Nature firsthand as a medic during Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, seeing the Haitian people survive with almost nothing has changed Treiber.

“I think this is going to change how I live and how I treat my kids,” said Treiber. “These are kids that have don’t even have a pillow to sleep on or toys to play with. If those people saw how we lived, they would think we were kings. My kids have so much stuff compared to those kids. I want them to know just how good they have it.”