SEQUIM — Pausing for a few minutes in Thursday’s early morning chill, Sandra Boudrou spoke of preparing her body and mind for an almost-unimaginable scene.
“It’s pretty intense, but we can make a difference,” said Boudrou.
“It” is Haiti, still engulfed in suffering 23 days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit its capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding communities.
Boudrou, 67, is a volunteer emergency medical technician and one of three medics from Clallam County Fire District No. 3 who departed for Haiti on Thursday afternoon — a day after five Port Angeles firefighters and EMTs returned from 10 days helping in Haiti.
Boudrou is traveling with firefighter-paramedic Bryan Swanberg and volunteer EMT Jay Jacobsen.
The three from the Sequim and Gardiner area will spend a week working with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in a camp outside the capital.
Around them will be nearly 100,000 refugees, many of whom have had no medical help since the quake, Swanberg said.
The three responded just this week to a call from the International Medical Corps Emergency Response Team, which is deploying relief workers across Haiti by connecting them with already-established groups such as the 82nd Airborne.
Accompanying the Sequim medics are five emergency-room nurses from Seattle and Mount Vernon, Swanberg added.
Each worker is paying his or her own way — about $1,000 in travel and food expenses, Fire District 3 Lt. Robert Rhoads estimated.
The team will bring to the Haiti camp things the military has not, such as children’s doses of antibiotics, Motrin and other medicine for youngsters.
“This came together on Tuesday. We made the flight arrangements yesterday,” Boudrou said Thursday morning.
On the trio’s to-get list were anti-malarial pills and immunizations for hepatitis A, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella and typhoid.
Jacobsen and Swanberg said goodbye to their wives and young children — Swanberg, 31, has 9-month-old and 3-year-old girls — while Boudrou told her grown children she was headed into another disaster scene.
Boudrou started out as a flight attendant, quit to raise her family and then began a second career in emergency medical care 27 years ago.
In 2004, she cared for survivors after Hurricane Ivan, the 10th-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, slammed into Jamaica and Grenada.
And on the North Olympic Peninsula, Boudrou serves as incident manager on wild-land fires.
A relief worker must, she said, keep an open mind and heart.
And “it doesn’t matter what happens.We will figure it out . . . the hardest part is staying healthy,” since spoiled food or bad water can stop even the toughest in their tracks.
The Sequim team will subsist on MREs and Clif bars, Boudrou said, and Swanberg is bringing a water filter for them.
Swanberg added that he spent time brainstorming with the team of five Port Angeles firefighters who returned Wednesday after 10 days in Haiti.
Prepare yourself for fierce heat and humidity, they told him.
Swanberg may send e-mail updates next week, and perhaps post on his Facebook page, but he couldn’t be sure there’ll be time for that.
Rhoads, who serves as the media liaison for Fire District 3, said he will convey messages from the Sequim team and arrange a meeting with the medics after they return Feb. 13.
The Sequim team members “did their own trades and covered their own shifts,” added District 3 Chief Steve Vogel.
“I am proud of my firefighters,” he added. “They are compassionate . . . that is why I like the fire service.”
The three have ample experience, he said: a combined 52 years.
Boudrou “is a goer,” Vogel added; never mind the fact that she’s a few years past traditional retirement age.
Boudrou smiled and shrugged. The secrets, she said, are “being around young people, and doing what you love.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.