Saturday, Jan. 13 was a bright, sunny day in San Sebastian, El Salvador, but 11 University volunteers woke up with mixed emotions as their 10-day health care education mission came to a close.
Although they were glad to return to the comforts of American life, the members of Nursing Students Without Borders were reluctant to leave the friends, teachers and health care professionals they had met in South America.
The dedicated group woke up early for its daily morning jog, packed and loaded into a Red Cross minivan right on schedule at 9:45 a.m. The students couldn't have known their prompt departure quite possibly saved their lives.
The Organization
Far from knowing they would encounter a natural disaster, Nursing Students Without Borders established a series of nine trips to El Salvador to help provide basic health education and resources to San Sebastian residents.
In El Salvador, the group "had two main focuses," said Ann Maushammer, a trip member who is in the second degree program of the Nursing School. The first, she said, was to educate local Red Cross members and teachers about health topics they expressed interest in during the Nursing Students Without Borders' first trip to the area. The other concentration of the trip was to establish a support group for diabetes, a genetic disease that frequently occurs among Hispanics.
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Fourth-year Nursing student Matthew Walden is the Co-founder and director of International Development of the philanthropic organization. Although he did not go on the most recent trip, he has worked closely with the San Sebastian Red Cross in the past. The El Salvadorian Red Cross has extremely poor funding from the local government, and Walden's organization has "been able to attend to their specific needs that have never been addressed."
Maushammer confirmed the dismal situation of healthcare in the San Sebastian community.
"They do have a government clinic there in the town, but they lack most of the supplies that the government is supposed to provide to them -- basic things like gloves, gauze, toilet paper -- and that's just to start with," she said.
The lone Red Cross doctor works 24 hours a day, three days a week, and is paid only $100 a month.
But the nursing students do not go to El Salvador to impose Western health practices on the local community.
"We only offer guidance in the areas of health improvement that they identify for us," Walden said. "Only they know what they need. We can only listen to them and provide for them as best as we can."
In fact, the Charlottesville-Albermarle Rescue Squad has just donated an ambulance to San Sebastian -- the area's first.
Thus, at the end of ten days, the University students and faculty echoed the sentiments of fourth-year College student and trip-member Clay Councill. He felt the trip was successful in establishing a foundation of medical services, and that the group had been "well received by people in San Sebastian."
The longest day
So on Jan. 13, the group was satisfied with its work and ready to go home. "It seemed like a very normal day to us," said Esther Miller, a fourth-year Nursing student who went on the trip.
After a goodbye party the night before, the group was all ready to go.
"We went early in the morning and we packed up and we left to the minute, right on time," Miller said.
The 11 volunteers loaded into the Red Cross minivan, following a pickup truck carrying their luggage. They began the two-hour trip to the airport down the Pan-American Highway.
"We were just kind of talking and thinking about home, and getting ready to get on the airplane," Councill said.
But all of a sudden, the van went around a sharp curve, and it began "swaying around, and everyone was wondering what was going on," said Patti Goerman, a Nursing Graduate student who went on the trip. The shaking and swerving lasted about 45 seconds, so the Red Cross driver pulled over to check that the tires weren't flat.
"The radio was off," recalled Maushammer, "which was kind of weird, but in a third world country these things happen and it doesn't always mean there's a problem."
With the wheels and steering column appearing to be in working order, the group continued without incident to the airport, where a huge traffic jam prevented them from getting closer than a block away.
Lanes of cars were backed up bumper to bumper, and people were getting out and walking around.
"We just waited patiently," Miller said, "and a guy came up to us and said a bridge had collapsed on top of a bus, and could we help because we were in a Red Cross van."
The volunteers would find out later that at the time of the earthquake, they had been only a mile away from the demolished bridge. According to Miller, a policeman then approached them and said 'there's been an earthquake and it's destroyed part of the airport.'
With this fragmented news, the group radioed another Red Cross unit and jumped out of the van to see if there were any injured people at the airport. One man had suffered a heart attack, and the group splinted the broken arm of another man, but overall the injuries were minimal.
However, the atmosphere was "very much chaotic," said third-year College student and Argentinean EMT Julian Sosnik.
Various officials were announcing news about the status of flights, and police "were pulling people away from the building, afraid parts of the building might fall from aftershocks."
"The facade of the airport had fallen down," Maushammer said. "A lot of glass windows were broken. Parts of the ceiling had fallen down and there were people running around."
The hot, sunny day had turned cloudy and oppressive, and many panicked people singled out the Red Cross van for help. The University volunteers wanted to stay and help. But the vehicles they had been in were needed elsewhere, and the Red Cross driver did not feel comfortable leaving them at the airport alone.
The pickup truck that carried their luggage left for San Sebastian, and eventually the van and NSWB volunteers followed suit. On the way back, the students encountered the effects of the quake.
"There were telephone poles bent over the street [and] bridges we were driving over that were visibly damaged. The roof tiles would be right in the middle of the street. Plaster walls had fractured and fallen into the sidewalk," Councill said.
However, the most devastating spectacle of the return trip was a massive landslide which covered a huge chunk of the Pan American Highway, forcing the volunteers to take an alternate small dirt road back to San Sebastian.
"A bus was on that road and it's still unaccounted for," Councill said. The landslide was later reported to be 15 meters high and have spanned 300 meters. "It was literally like an entire mountain had fallen on the highway we had just driven over," he said.
"It was really lucky that we started exactly at the time we were supposed to start. If we had been just a little bit later we could have been hit by the landslide," Miller speculated.
The landslide is estimated to have occurred about half an hour after the group drove on that section of the road.
But the challenges were far from over for the NSWB group. A fear of aftershocks confined them to San Sebastian, but under the charge of the Red Cross, Maushammer and her colleagues "knew we were in good hands."
With most of the country's phone lines down, the group went from payphone to payphone trying to find a working line, and after hours of attempts finally managed to get through to the American Embassy, which notified the members' family members of their safety.
Although San Sebastian suffered only minimal effects from the quake, the rest of El Salvador experienced tremendous damage.
The volunteers didn't realize how much the earthquake had affected the whole country until they returned and read news stories in the U.S., Goerman said. "Seeing the full extent of the damages when we got here ... made us realize how lucky we were that nothing had happened to us," she said.
Sosnik concurred. "We didn't react until we came home [to the U.S.] and thought back on what had happened and the dimensions of the earthquake itself and how close we were to massive destruction areas," he said. "When we were there we were too close to the trees to see the forest."
Now that they are back, however, the volunteers plan to use the media attention they have gotten to help garner aid for the rest of El Salvador. Nursing Students Without Borders has organized a campus-wide, month-long campaign for February to collect funds for earthquake victims. The natural disaster left a great number of people homeless, and there is "a huge potential for disease and death even after the earthquake," Miller explained. Anyone who wants to contribute to the earthquake relief fund or the NSWB long-term education effort is encouraged to call the organization at 804-964-6997.
"The biggest lesson I've learned is that the natural disaster stories we see on they news every day are not just news stories, they are profound experiences that happen in people's lives," Councill said. "There are ways we can connect ourselves to more of a global community"
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