Seventeen-year-old Henry Francis III, a student at McCallie School, is still in a bit of an emotional fog about his four-day trip to Haiti.
Henry, whose friends call him Shayton, is a resident of Signal Mountain. He traveled to the earthquake-ravaged country as a volunteer to help his father, Henry Francis Jr., an obstetrician/gynecologist based in St. Croix, who had gone to Haiti to help with disaster relief.
“My father told me, ‘I think it would be good for you to see a disaster with your own eyes,’ ” Shayton remembers.
The teenager’s most visceral memories of Haiti are sensory: heat that seemed to drain the adrenaline straight out of his body; thirst that made a cold Coke seem like a godsend; visions of dead children that short-circuited his emotions.
“I think it will be a lasting memory,” he says now, almost solemnly.
Days after the earthquake, his father telephoned Shayton with the offer to join him in Haiti. He was preparing for the SAT but quickly agreed to set aside his studies for a few days.
Soon, Shayton was on an airplane. While in transit, he was mistaken for a physician. “They kept calling me doctor: Doctor this, doctor that. Finally, I said, ‘I’m not a doctor,’ ” Shayton recalls.
Eventually, he connected with his father at a Port-au-Prince hospital, where hundreds of Haitians would gather in the streets daily begging for medical attention, Shayton said.
He was put to work helping women in labor, an overwhelming experience for a young man who had never before witnessed a birth.
“I’ve never seen people in that much pain,” he said.
Once, he encouraged his exhausted father to take a nap and offered to watch a patient while he rested. Soon though, the pregnant mother’s baby began to crown, Shayton said, and he went rushing through the hospital looking for help.
“I finally found someone who literally caught the baby,” he said.
One day, he ventured away from the hospital into an area of urban devastation that has come to be called the “epicenter.” Shayton said it looked as if all the buildings on a big city street had simply collapsed. Evidence of dead bodies was everywhere, he said.
Once, while walking with a journalist taking pictures, a Haitian man carrying a shotgun began to glare at the photographer and even placed his hand menacingly on Shayton, who went into fight-or-flight mode, he said.
“I was thinking, ‘if he points the gun at me I might have to attack,’ ” Shayton said.
An interpreter helped defuse the situation.
While in Haiti, Shayton met a 17-year-old boy called Wolf, who became his instant friend. Shayton learned that Wolf’s school had been obliterated by the earthquake and most of his family was missing. They exchange cell-phone calls now, and Shayton openly wishes for a way to bring his suffering friend to the United States.
Despite the devastation he witnessed, Shayton said he saw signs of hope in Haiti. Everywhere, he said, were makeshift families; women who had gathered helpless children together who were not their own.
As for his own family, Shayton said his father took him aside on the flight home and said, “I’m proud of you (son), that you stuck it out.”
Shayton told his dad he was proud of him, too.
At spring break, Shayton wants to return to Haiti, validation that his efforts were not just a valuable life experience but an ongoing commitment to something bigger than himself.