"Why aren't you going?"
Parvus, a thin woman with silky blond hair, was temporarily at a loss for words.
"Because, I didn't think I could get out of work."
"You absolutely should go!" Shields said.
At 6 p.m. that evening, Parvus was seated in row 9B on a USAirways flight to the Dominican Republic.
In her baggage, she carried four large boxes of medical supplies that Wills Eye had delivered to her apartment while she was packing.
Britt was met in the airport by her father, Dirk, sister, Candice, brothers Matt and Chad and Chad's partner, Tommy Davis, along with Luc Bouquet, a Haitian-born nurse practitioner.
Dirk, a family physician and director of a medical center in Vero Beach, Fla., has been building the Haiti Clinic using local health care workers, missionary connections and private donations. A group goes down every two months for a weekend and sees about 800 patients.
"We have no idea what we're going to find," Dirk said, leading the troop toward the two SUVs he'd rented. They rustled up some twine and valiantly tied a dozen enormous bags of supplies to the roofs.
After two hours sleep in a hotel, they drove in the dark towards the Haitian border.
*
Television reports had made the group nervous. And the rumors that flew like hot ashes from the news pyre had them worried that by making this trip, they would definitely be setting themselves up for four days of misery, and possibly risking their lives.
They heard that the roads are impassable and it would take 18 hours to drive from Santo Domingo to Haiti. They heard that medical supplies would be confiscated at the border. They had visions of rotting bodies strewn on the streets and lawless rioters coming out shooting at night.
