In a country they didn't know and hampered by a language they did not speak, the patients and relatives were moved from house to house, sometimes stranded without transportation or documentation, left to navigate a system without the help of the doctors who brought them here.
Team Ange - the loose-knit humanitarian group that physicians Katie Gollotto and Julia Helstrom-Coupet formed after the earthquake - believed it had fulfilled its obligations.
"It makes me sad things didn't turn out the way we intended them," Helstrom-Coupet said.
Still, said Gollotto, "we would not change our decision to bring them here, because that's why they're with us today."
In September, seven months after leaving Haiti, the evacuees moved into two homes in Germantown when an international medical-aid group, Partners in Health, intervened in response to concerns about the patients' well-being from Philadelphia-area Haitian Americans.
Today, the evacuees are doing well. But their stories illustrate the complexity of giving aid, and how the distance between good intentions and good follow-through can be as great as the miles between Haiti and Philadelphia.
"To not provide any additional support for them puts them in an impossible situation," said Naomi Rosenberg, Partners in Health's Philadelphia representative. "When nobody feels a sense of responsibility, you always run the risk that bad things can happen."
After the earthquake left hundreds of thousands injured, doctors from around the world, including private-practice physicians Gollotto, 32, of Medford, and Helstrom-Coupet, 33, of Harleysville, wanted to help.
"We knew we had to respond in some way," Gollotto said.
