Photo by Ron Cassie News-Post reporter Ron Cassie prepares to leave Santo Domingo for Haiti during his recent trip in the aftermath of an earthquake.

Onelis Rivas, a local Church of the Brethren pastor, had arranged a tour of the city's trauma center. It was overflowing with victims of the Haitian earthquake. For Choe, the tour was an opportunity to determine firsthand the best contribution -- in terms of supplies or food -- he and Zimmerman could make with the medicine and money they'd brought from Frederick.

I can't speak for Choe or Zimmerman, but I'd never seen such circumstances in my life.

The 250-bed trauma center, built in 1960, appeared in chaos. Rusting hospital beds filled the run-down corridors. Exhausted family members tried to comfort loved ones with twisted bones and horrific injuries wrapped in bandages. Many awaited surgery nearly two weeks after the quake.

Ambulances unloaded patients at the emergency room as helicopters, landing at a nearby baseball field, kept arriving.

Entering a children's ward with chipped paint, battered furniture and equipment, with notebook and camera in hand, emotion rose in my chest. Tears began forming. As a parent, you can't help but think of your daughter or son in such condition.

I stopped myself. A job to do and all that.

As a reporter, such access to a U.S. hospital is out of the question. This tour was a break and I needed to talk to patients, family members and hospital staff, and get their story out. It was abundantly clear the earthquake victims and their medical crises were not limited to devastated Haiti where the television reporting was emanating. They'd crossed the border, exhausting Dominican resources as well.

There had been no humanitarian assistance from the U.S. or any international aid organization at Dr. Dario Contreras by the time we arrived. (Later in the week a four-person orthopedic team from Chicago came on the scene.)

The hospital director told me they'd received 270 Haitian patients and performed some 140 surgeries on top of their normal bustling routine. He described shortages of bone plates, bone screws, protheses and milk for the traumatized Haitian kids.

A dozen patients remain seared in my memory. The little girl, a paraplegic whose legs were rolled awkwardly to one side. A girl with a brain injury who will never walk again.

One boy, with an IV bag, a large bandage covering his head and another on his arm, had not yet been told his mother had died in the earthquake.

Two weeks later, I catch myself thinking about them.

In the ICU, one man lay in a vegetative state. Another woman, semiconscious, moaned in pain.

Outside an operating room, a woman lay in bed with an oversized red trash bag wrapped around her decomposing left leg. Choe, too, said he couldn't get those people out of his mind.

The next day, we were scheduled to head to Haiti.

Waiting for the pastor in Santo Domingo, we saw a young man on a motorbike killed in an accident. Blood covered the street. His limp body was placed in the bed of a pickup truck as Choe examined him.

Obviously, his death wasn't connected to the earthquake, but for me, it brought back images of the horrible pain and injury we'd witnessed the previous afternoon at the hospital.