Listen to Vermont Public Radio host Neal Charnoff's interviews with Valley News staffers while they were reporting from Haiti: • Reporter Gregory Trotter on Feb. 22. • Photographer Jason Johns on Feb. 24.

Port-Au-Prince — The throng of Haitians surged toward the missionaries, the lines breaking down, a frenzied mob forming swiftly as a storm cloud.

“Tell them to get back! Back them all up!” Bob Parker yelled to a translator.

Parker had led this small group from the Lebanon United Methodist Church to the Croix des Missions neighborhood of Haiti. On Friday, their final day of the trip, they had intended to hand out hundreds of donated T-shirts, work gloves, coloring books, kitchen supplies and soccer balls in an orderly fashion.

But for the people of the destitute neighborhood, their needs were too immense for order. It was an opportunity to obtain goods for their families.

The previously tranquil and festive day had turned to bedlam. Unsettled in the aftermath, Parker said the crush that bordered on dangerous would go to his “lessons learned” list for the next trip. » Read more

Port-Au-Prince — George Sykes was alert, poised to cross the street as a turbulence of tap-taps and mopeds swept past.

“I’m just really cautious,” Sykes said.

Suddenly, he plunged into the traffic, ignoring the honks, then hustled down a side street toward the American Red Cross annex in Petionville, a suburb of the capital. He passed a collapsed concrete building where children stood outside begging and tossing pebbles at passersby.

It’s been a bit of an adjustment for the former Lebanon city councilor. Sykes and two others with Upper Valley ties - Meg DiCarlo, of Woodstock, and Cristina Hammond, of Hanover - are working for the Red Cross in the capital long after many workers from non-government organizations have closed up shop. » Read more

Cange, Haiti — The Dartmouth surgeons looked down for a silent moment on perhaps the sickest patient here.

Anesthetized and naked on the operating table, the emaciated 12-year-old girl, Loveda, had third-degree burns from hip to breastbone and the same on both legs. Her clothing had caught fire two months ago while she was pouring fuel into a lantern, she would later say. The burns had not healed by themselves, and without surgery she soon could die.

“What do you think, Chris?” said Joe Rosen to his former student, Chris Jensen, who now has his own plastic surgery practice in Fairbanks, Alaska.

“I think we need to start grafting,” he said. » Read more

Maissade, Haiti — Josette Fameux stood up yesterday beaming, clapping, jiggling with deep belly laughter.

Josette Fameux stood up.

A little more than a year after the earthquake that decimated her country, it’s a remarkable feat of medicine, luck and will that the double-amputee is even alive, much less standing and walking around the block. In the days that followed the earthquake, Fameux’s life was snatched from death repeatedly by Dartmouth medical professionals. Her son drove her to a hospital in Hinche, on Haiti’s Central Plateau, where a team of Dartmouth medical staff was working.

The decisions to amputate her legs and to give her kidney dialysis saved her. Months later, another Dartmouth team of physical and occupational therapists got her out of bed and out in the sunshine for the first time in months.

“I wanted to walk! I wanted to walk!” Fameux said, laughing, surrounded by her children and neighbors smiling and looking on as she remembered her arduous recovery. » Read more

Cange, Haiti —The Dartmouth medical team - five doctors and a nurse - stood sweating and squinting in the heat and clamor outside the Port-au-Prince airport, looking a bit dazed as they waited for a man named Alix.

The medical team was the first contingency dispatched on behalf of the Dartmouth Haiti Response, a collaboration between Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in about eight months, after officials canceled a planned trip in June citing the need to reassess the efforts.

After an earthquake devastated Haiti last January, a team of Upper Valley physicians and nurses spent more than a week caring for the victims at the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince. A little more than a year later, another team flew to Port-au-Prince yesterday to find that suffering, chaos and challenges remained. » Read more

Hanover — Many of the Haitians in the Hinche hospital, bed-ridden since the Jan. 12 earthquake with fractured or amputated limbs, had not felt the sunshine in more than a month.

Some of them had not even moved much during that time.

A Dartmouth medical team -- including a nurse practitioner, three physical therapists and an occupational therapist -- changed that. They got people moving. » Read more

Port-Au-Prince — About an hour before dawn, we awoke to loud and joyful singing in the streets.

It was, at first, an annoyance: First, a night’s sleep interrupted by wailing roosters and snarling dogs - and now this?

But we were curious and began fumbling with the tent door zippers in the dark. We had been camped out on a concrete slab in the front courtyard of the Haitian family’s home where the Dartmouth medical team was staying on a relief mission to the earthquake-ravaged capital. A tall wooden fence divided the street from the tent I shared with Valley News photographer Jason Johns. The fence gate was locked from the inside with a padlock, but it was not completely shut, so we eased out onto the street. A nearly full moon lingered in the night sky.

The sight illuminated by that moon was startling. A group of about 60 Haitians stood on a street corner and sang gospel hymns. Women sang a graceful chorus that reminded me of slowly falling leaves. A hand-drum and a tambourine made a simple, steady beat. A man, wearing a tie and carrying a book, chanted over the beat in a powerful voice, driving the song forward. After a moment, I realized he was preaching. » Read more

Hanover — The 11-year-old girl lay in the hospital bed with a fractured face and a crushed torso. She was writhing in pain and had tubes sticking out of her chest.

It was one of the first days in Hinche, a town on Haiti’s Central Plateau, for Dr. Rajan Gupta and his team of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center doctors and nurses. Newly arrived to the hospital, they didn’t want to take over. But they were concerned about the girl and attempted to coordinate care for her with Haitian doctors.

Two days later, they found her bed empty and the chest tubes lying on the ground.

“At first, I wondered ‘Where did she go?’” said Chris O’Connell, a flight nurse and educator for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team. “Then suddenly, I realized she was dead. It was very sad.” » Read more

Hanover — Another plane carrying Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center staff is scheduled to leave for Haiti from the Lebanon airport today, marking the next phase of the response to the Jan. 12 earthquake - rehabilitation.

The fifth team of Dartmouth/DHMC personnel consists of three physical therapists, an occupational therapist and a nurse practitioner. They will work at the Sainte Therese Hospital in Hinche, a town on Haiti’s Central Plateau, helping patients with rehabilitative needs. The team also will conduct a needs assessment to assist Partners in Health in helping patients through physical and mental health rehabilitation. » Read more

Picture trying to put together a puzzle with a dozen strangers - blindfolded. Few of you share a language. Many of the pieces are missing.

That’s how one doctor described the ongoing aid effort in Haiti.

One organization among the many trying to make sense of the madness is International Medical Corps, a global nonprofit humanitarian organization, founded in 1984, that provides health care assistance and medical training to poverty-stricken areas around the globe. » Read more

Hinche, Haiti - Josette Fameux rested in her cot, her legs now bandaged stumps. Her 18-year-old daughter sat beside her, fanning her with a towel to cool her in the sweltering air.

She had lost so much in the Jan. 12 earthquake. But at least she was alive. » Read more

Port-Au-Prince - For the nurses entering their second week in Haiti, the early morning drive had become a welcome daily ritual - a last chance to compose themselves before the chaos.

“It’s really important we have this time, as we descend into the noise and the dust and the smells, to get our game faces on,” said Dr. Jim Geiling, who led the team of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center nurses in their work to relieve some of the misery caused by the Jan. 12 earthquake and its aftershocks, as their bus rumbled toward the city. » Read more