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Video: Jude Highgate
talks about the relief effort in Haiti.

EXCLUSIVE by Adam Williams

A Canterbury doctor has described
scenes of total devastation after returning from Haiti.

Jude Highgate (pictured right) flew back into
Gatwick on Saturday after a week helping the relief effort in the
earthquake hit capital, Port-au-Prince.

Jude, from Birch Road, Wincheap,
was part of a nine-strong team of volunteers from British charity
Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID).

The 28-year-old, who works in the
anaesthetic department at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, is no
stranger to such missions. In 2007, she joined SARAID volunteers
helping victims of the Gloucestershire floods and in the same year,
joined relief workers in Mexico following a landslide.

Jude was alerted on the day the
quake struck by international text message alert system GDAX, that
she would be placed on standby to travel to Haiti.

She said: “Within 20 minutes, I had
a message telling me there were reports a hospital had
collapsed.

“That was followed by another
message telling me to be ready to get to Heathrow for a flight
out.

“We met up the following night, but
didn’t actually fly out until the day after as we had to wait for a
commercial flight to take us to the Dominican Republic.”

Jude and the team, including
volunteer firefighters and police officers, then had to make their
own arrangements to get into Haiti.

Four days after the earthquake,
they were airlifted to the US embassy in Port-au-Prince by US
Customs and Border Control officers and were immediately tasked to
help the UN co-ordinated operation.

The city was split into sectors and
each day teams were sent to a different area to search through
buildings, in the hope of finding survivors. Jude admits the scale
of the damage was immense.

She added: “Television pictures
show a lot of the damage, but in some areas the devastation was
just total.

“One day we were searching through
a school where 200 children were missing. When you saw relatives
sifting through the rubble trying to find signs of life, that’s
when the desperation hit you.

“There’s been a lot of criticism
that the aid effort wasn’t well organised, but in many places the
US military were having to set up things from scratch.”

Read more about how people
around the district are helping the Haiti disaster appeal in this
week's Kentish Gazette.