FORT WAYNE – Last week, another team of 21 Fort Wayne-area doctors, nurses and other specialists returned from a trip to Haiti, coming home as quietly as they left the week before.

The stories told by Dr. Brian Lee, a Fort Wayne plastic surgeon who has helped organize the teams, were the same as the stories he told about previous trips to Haiti after the earthquake leveled most of Port-au-Prince more than six months ago.

The clinic where they worked, Mission of Hope, was busier than ever, he said. Many of the people he and other volunteers treated were seeking help from earthquake injuries that, amazingly, had never been treated. Others were people seeking help with injuries that hadn’t been treated correctly – broken bones that were never aligned correctly or never healed.

There were new injuries, though, the standard type of injuries that were seen before the earthquake – burns, motorcycle crashes, cases of malaria.

“That’s day in and day out,” Lee said.

Occasionally someone will show up with a gunshot wound, and there are always plenty of injuries from taxi accidents. In Haiti, people get around on vehicles called tap taps. People pile into them, and they have wrecks all the time, Lee said.

Lee called it “new trauma on top of old trauma.”

Conditions were as grim as they have always been. Temperatures hit 120 degrees in some of the buildings, but no one complained.

One can’t say that life is returning to normal, though. The rubble from the earthquake is still extensive, and huge numbers of people are still living in makeshift tent cities. Large numbers of people are leaving Port-au-Prince. Many people are afraid of living in multistory buildings, the type that collapsed when the earthquake hit.

As bleak and hopeless as the task seems in Haiti, volunteers continue to show up.

Amazingly, on Aug. 8 another team of volunteers from the area plans to make another trip to Haiti for what is called a surgical week.

Lee, meanwhile, is trying to organize a group of perhaps 10 or 12 communities across the country that can assemble additional surgical teams.

“There have been hundreds of volunteers, and they all want to come back,” Lee said. “One couple is planning to go again in two weeks, and they’re thinking of staying there for a year.”

But why is there so much interest from Fort Wayne, I asked him. Perhaps it’s the Midwest mindset, a willingness to reach out and help, he said. Perhaps it’s because the clinic, Mission of Hope, was founded by a couple of graduates of Huntington University.

One can’t be sure, but there are other hotbeds of doctors and nursing also lining up to help, such as Austin, Texas.

After August, though, the trips will have to stop for a while. Construction of a hospital at the clinic, which stopped when the earthquake hit, will resume.

“We’re reclaiming the lab,” putting in a lot of lab equipment, Lee said. “A couple of big charity organizations are looking at funding the hospital.”

So visits by teams of surgical doctors probably won’t resume for a few months.

They will resume eventually, Lee said, and people still want to volunteer.

It’s as though once you’ve been to Haiti and seen what is going on, you can’t just walk away from it, Lee said.