The rubble and ruins of Port-au-Prince are a long way from the tree-lined streets, split-rail fences and carriage houses of Mondamin Farms.

But 40-some residents of this quiet, affluent neighborhood in Manheim Township on Sunday heard first-person accounts of the relief efforts in Haiti, less than three weeks after an earthquake ravaged its capital city.

The quake, which struck Jan. 12, left 100,000 to 200,000 of its people dead and many more grievously injured.

"We were lucky," orthopedic surgeon Dr. Gary Zartman said Sunday. "We had a hospital that was standing. We had operating rooms to work in."

More than 100 miles from the quake's epicenter near Port-au-Prince, a team from Ephrata Community Hospital performed about 15 operations and treated about 80 additional earthquake victims over six days at Beraca Medical Center, a small missionary hospital in La Pointe, near Port-de-Paix on Haiti's northern coast.

They also provided numerous consultations for people who were not injured in the earthquake but needed help from the American doctors — in many cases for injuries that had gone untreated for years.

Zartman, general surgeon Dr. William Piepgrass, surgical nurse Helen Polauf and nurse-anesthetist Don Cassano made up the local medical team, which flew down to Haiti on Jan. 20.

"They didn't have any quake damage there," Zartman said. "But they had barely enough medicines and bandages to take care of their regular patients, much less all of the quake victims."

The team's first surgical patient was a woman who had been trapped with a metal beam through her leg. There were no broken bones, Zartman said, but there was major muscle and tissue damage.

The dead tissue was cleaned away, he said, leaving exposed bone. "Even if we could have saved her foot, she had no muscle left to move it with," he said.

The doctors had no choice but to amputate.

Time was working against them, Piepgrass said.

"It's not like here, where you can get into an emergency room in an hour," he said. "We were seeing injuries that were 10 days old, and they hadn't had any care."

The Ephrata team took about 900 pounds of medical supplies to Haiti, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the small country's needs, Piepgrass said.

"It's amazing how much you can do with whatever you have available," he said.

"We had to learn to improvise," Polauf said.

For instance, she said, they quickly ran out of the saline solution used to irrigate wounds. At first, they opened IV packs for the sterile solution, then resorted to boiling water.

"They had shelves full of instruments, but some you couldn't even open. They were rusted shut," she said. "They had five or six sterilizers jammed here and there, but none of them worked."

They had to soak supplies in alcohol or use an old pressure cooker with a broken gauge to clean the equipment as best they could, Polauf said.

Medicines were out of date.

Rats scurried in the halls.

And much-needed supplies — even the ones they brought with them from Ephrata — were locked up and hard to access.

The anesthesia machine had a leak, so Cassano made medicinal "cocktails" to do the job.

"The hardest thing was learning what you couldn't do," Zartman said.

"If you can avoid an operation, do," he said. "Any time you open the skin, you're risking an infection."

To make matters worse, he said, prosthetic limbs could only be obtained from a facility in Port-au-Prince that had been destroyed in the quake.

"Now what they need is plastic surgeons, people who can do skin grafts, rehab specialists and people who can make artificial limbs," Zartman said.

"And a lot of crutches."

The local relief effort was organized by Piepgrass, who grew up in Haiti with his missionary parents and spent several years in the 1980s helping to establish a higher level of medical care in the poverty-stricken island nation.

"All of the good relief we're trying to provide is like a five-foot pipe of water that, when it gets there, has to fit through a one-inch pipe," Piepgrass, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a roaring fire, said Sunday.

"We really didn't do a lot," he said. "Haiti was barely surviving before the earthquake. We didn't think it could get any worse. But this was devastating. ... The future looks pretty bleak."

The Sunday event was hosted by Tim and Louise Brown, who invited neighbors to their home on Mondamin Farm Road to hear accounts of relief work.

"You read about it in the newspaper, but here are two of our neighbors who were there," Louise Brown said.

"We are all so fortunate," she said. "We all might have given something through various ways. But here is a direct link to a doctor and a hospital in Haiti ... and anything we can do to help is worthwhile."

tknapp@lnpnews.com