Mobile medical clinic workers treat thousands in Louisiana

Posted: 9/30/05

Mobile medical clinic workers
treat thousands in Louisiana

By Craig Bird

Baptist Child & Family Services

BATON ROUGE, La.–The killing winds of Hurricane Katrina had barely moved north when two mobile medical units from Baptist Child & Family Services inched their way into Baton Rogue, literally following road crews clearing away limbs, debris and downed power lines from Interstate 10.

In fact, the two vehicles–one based in Laredo and the other in San Antonio–headed for Louisiana while I-10 was still closed, arriving in Louisiana just as officials allowed traffic back in.

Over the next two weeks, Baptist Child & Family Services staff and volunteer medical personnel saw 10,000 individuals, treating about 4,000 and providing medicines to most of the others.

“The first week or so, the two teams were seeing 1,000 patients each day in areas where people had been without any medical attention for days,” said Cindi Garcia, who heads up the agency's program utilizing the mobile units.

“Minor cuts and bruises, major illnesses and everything in between–no one had been there to attend to them. When those clinics-on-wheels arrived, they got a wonderful welcome.”

That welcome included a surprise visit from music stars Gloria and Emilio Estefan; film and television stars Andy Garcia, Daisy Fuentes and Jimmy Smits; and baseball legend Tommy Lasorda, who toured the areas to encourage the evacuees and the volunteer workers.

The celebrities delivered donated medicines and told the staff how proud they were of the job they were doing. When a Baptist Child & Family Services administrator expressed appreciation for their visit and donation, Andy Garcia replied: “We should be thanking you for what you and your agency are doing. We are Christians and really appreciate all this. We just showed up. Your people are doing all the hard work.”

“The first few days were a bit complicated because we were scrambling for supplies and volunteers,” said John Myers of Castroville, who worked with the units the entire time.

“But after one of the churches where we were parked (Florida Boulevard Baptist Church in Baton Rogue) put up information about what we were doing on its website, the folks at Angel Flight and some others at Baptist Medical Dental Fellowship found out about us, and resources started rolling in.”

Baptist Child & Family Services purchased $40,000 of psychotropic drugs and collected another $200,000 of donated medicines to ship to the units where it joined a flow of contributions.

“I bet we had $1 million worth of medicines,” Myers said. “We were able to set up the pharmacies, one for prescriptions the doctors wrote and another for over-the-counter medicines. These people didn't have aspirin or cough syrup, either.”

“People would come in and get what they needed,” said Rosa Raygoza. “When we told them to put their money away that they didn't have to pay, many of them literally broke down and cried, asking over and over, 'You mean it's really free?' They just couldn't believe it.”

She also saw immediate changes in herself after seeing first hand the devastation of property and people's lives.

“The first day I acted like it was a normal work day and put my nail polish on just right and fixed my hair just so,” she said.

“But after that first shift, seeing the situation, I went straight to putting all my energy into helping those folks. My appearance wasn't nearly so important when people were trying to put their shattered lives back together.”

The unit's reputation also attracted visitors from the Red Cross and Federal Emergency Management Agency who came by to get suggestions of how to set up medical work in other areas.

“God always provided what we needed, no matter what,” Myers noted.

One unit's generator refused to work several times in critical situations. The first time it happened, “A guy named Mark walked up while I was working on the generator,” Myers recalled. “He wasn't from the area but had driven down to see if there was anything to do to help–and he knew everything about generators.

“At another location, the wheelchair lift got stuck in the up position and I couldn't get it to move, and it turned out that about 100 power company line workers were housed in the same church where we were parked, and they knew just what to do.”

God's providence included more than mechanical miracles, Raygoza is convinced.

“We wound up with teams of people from all across the United States who had never met each other working in difficult situations with desperate people,” she explained. “But we all got along great and worked great together. God put the people in that place at that time that needed to be there.”