High Schoolers Lend Helping Hand In Haiti

A three-and-a-half hour plane ride, Sam Hassett and Alexis Folz recently learned, can deposit passengers in another world.

Last week, the Ridgefield High School seniors were preparing to attend their prom in a Greenwich hotel. The week before, they were surrounded by devastation that, both said, had to be seen to be believed: post-earthquake Haiti.

"You'd never think it was actually happening on the same planet," Folz said.

The two aspiring nurses spent the start of their senior internships intaking patients, measuring blood pressure and dispensing medications in Jacmel, Haiti, at the center which Ridgefield has been rallying to help since an earthquake hammered the island nation in January. (Ridgefield Responds organizer Isabel Chase is Folz's mother.)

Folz and Hassett had the opportunity to gain hands-on medical experience at the clinic and to watch obstetricians and pediatricians at work while helping more than 300 patients receive medical care in three days.

Beyond the medical work, the fact that the mere presence of the volunteers made a vast impact further touched Folz, Hassett and Hassett's mother, Mary Ellen, who was also on the trip.

Mary Ellen Hassett recalled one young girl who came to the clinic with severe asthma on the Friday and Saturday they were working there.

"Sunday she was in church as healthy as can be," she said. "Honestly, that child could have died. In those conditions, that child could have died if the timing was different and the doctors weren't there."

"It definitely made me want to be a nurse more," Sam Hassett added, "because I saw all the people that didn't have anything and needed medical help, and it was great to see the nurses and doctors help them as much as they could."

For the remainder of their eight days in Jacmel, the young women helped serve meals, distribute clothes and flip-flops—most of which were donated by Ridgefielders—and visited the surrounding area. There was rubble where all the buildings should be, they said, and garbage everywhere. Most people lived in flimsy tents in the thick of Haiti's rainy season.

Folz and Hassett are spending the rest of their internship period at the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association.