By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
The amount of young people accompanying St. Paul's Episcopal Church's third Haiti visit made it special for Denise Wierman.
Denise's daughter, Dr. Meredith Wierman, made her last trip to Haiti as a 12-year-old.
Meredith returned this time to help her dad, Dr. James Wierman, see approximately 800 patients in four days.
Meredith is a first-year internal medicine resident at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Seeing that many patients was quite a step up from her usual clinic practice at Henry Ford of five patients an afternoon.
Her first patient was a 5-year-old in sickle cell crisis -- a horribly painful disease that requires hospital admission and often a morphine drip.
That same evening, Denise said, a man came to their guesthouse with Claude, 3, a "poster child for every Haitian disease."
Because of Claude's many diseases, Meredith decided she needed to treat him over several days. She had him come back twice a day, at 7 a.m. before they left for the clinic and again in the evening after they arrived home.
Twice a day, Meredith and Spanish teacher Sarah Ross, who sacrificed all of her protein bars, would feed him and treat his many problems. Sarah lived for a time in the Dominican Republic.
Ron Gunn, Jim and Denise Wierman and Southwestern Michigan College's Alumni Association decided to feed this family of five.
The youngest of the 17-member delegation, Union High School senior Shelly Murphy, 17, who accompanied her mother, Doreen, a nurse, learned how to take blood pressures and pulses and helped nurses do intake on all of the patients.
Haitians don't have Americans' sense of "personal space." So eager to be seen by doctors, they enveloped the nurses doing intake. At times, Wierman said, Shelly seemed to disappear in the midst of a throng of surging patients, but she stayed composed and continued working.
College freshman Jacob Gunn, an Edwardsburg graduate making his third trip, assisted the dentist and actually learned to pull teeth.
Gunn exhibited "an understanding of the people and culture that most adults have yet to grasp," Wierman said.
Although his father, Tom, has traveled to Haiti several times, it was Dustin Dalton's first visit. Dusty represented St. Denys Foundation, which purchased more than $10,000 worth of drugs for clinics.
Dalton worked in the dental clinic, assisting with the pulling of 337 teeth from 97 patients.