A medical team from Maine got home early Thursday after a grueling – and harrowing – trip to Haiti.

The five-member team from the Maine-Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency in Augusta spent three long days trying to save cholera victims in Cap Haitien, then had to get out of the city through violent street demonstrations and roadblocks.

“every roadblock we passed, there were crowds of people with Maine-Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency machetes and sticks running at us,” said Dr. Chiedza Jokonya of Cape Elizabeth, a pediatrician and faculty member who led the medical mission.

Jokonya’s team included Nina Miller, another faculty member, and three primary care residents – Suhas Pinnaka, Prativa Basnet and Lalaine Llanto.

Twice a year, Jokonya leads a weeklong medical mission to Haiti’s capital city, Port-Au-Prince. this time, the United Nations asked the team to go north to Cap Haitien, where the cholera epidemic was overwhelming medical personnel. the team agreed.

“they desperately needed help up north,” said Jokonya.

As of early this week, the cholera outbreak had killed 1,034 people in Haiti and hospitalized 16,799, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

When they arrived in Cap Haitien, Jokonya said, the situation was chaotic. everyone was getting IVs, whether they needed them or not, and supplies were limited.

“We spent a day just organizing triage,” Jokonya said.

Then she and the residents worked day and night, sometimes using flashlights, to treat cholera patients, some of whom arrived so dehydrated from vomiting and diarrhea that they could not be saved.

“the residents worked 72 hours straight with maybe a couple hours of sleep. all of them had patients dying on them,” she said. “We couldn’t stop. if we stopped, there was nobody to see the patients.”

The people at the hospital were grateful for the help, she said. But anger in the city’s streets made it difficult to leave.

“On the third day, when the U.N. was supposed to pick us up, that’s when the violence erupted,” she said.

Street demonstrations began in Cap Haitien on Monday over suspicions that the cholera was brought to Haiti by U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. Protesters threw rocks, blocked roads and set fires, forcing the airport to be closed.

The protests spread to Haiti’s capital Thursday as protesters blocked roads and attacked foreigners’ cars.

Jokonya’s team left the city Tuesday by truck after recruiting local men to provide security. they passed seven roadblocks, where they had to stop and move logs and, in one case, move a parked truck.

“We were stuck between groups of people,” she said. “There were fires along the way.”

When demonstrators threw stones or approached the truck, the local men got out and “talked them down,” she said.

The team drove three hours to Gonaives, where the U.S. Embassy arranged to take them to Port-Au-Prince, she said. they arrived in Boston late Wednesday and got home early Thursday.

“I don’t know what they are going to do if the (cholera) numbers increase,” Jokonya said. “I sent out appeals to groups of doctors to come and take our place, but because of the violence, I don’t think it will happen. this is the most frightening situation I have ever been in in my life.”

Jim Schneid, Maine-Dartmouth’s chairman, said the medical residency was glad to get the team home.

“We were all concerned for their safety when they were involved in the unrest,” he said. “they all knew there was a cholera risk when they went down last week, and they all had the option when asked by the United Nations to not participate. I’m very proud of the group.”

While the Maine-Dartmouth team was getting home, Nathan Nickerson of Portland was trying to find a way to get back to Cap Haitien.

The executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit Konbit Sante Cap Haitien Health Partnership was in Florida on Thursday, monitoring the security situation and hoping to fly to Cap Haitien as soon as today.

Nickerson, who was in Haiti just two weeks ago, hopes to help distribute medical supplies and water disinfection kits. But he said from Florida late Thursday that it wasn’t clear whether security had been restored enough to reopen Cap Haitien’s airport.

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

A child with cholera symptoms is treated by volunteer American doctors at a hospital in Archaie, Haiti, on Monday. (Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press)

Anti-United Nations riots spread to several Haitian cities and towns Tuesday, as protesters blaming a contingent of Nepalese peacekeepers for a cholera outbreak exchanged gunfire with UN soldiers.

The protests left at least two people dead. A demonstrator was shot dead by a UN peacekeeper during an exchange of gunfire in Quartier Morin, near Haiti’s second-largest city of Cap-Haitien, the UN mission said. it said it was investigating the shooting but asserted the soldier acted in self-defence.

Haiti Senate President Kelly Bastien told Radio Vision 2000 that a second demonstrator was shot and killed in Cap-Haitien itself. he did not know who shot him.

The 12,000-member force reported that at least six UN personnel were wounded in protests at Hinche in the central plateau, while local Radio Metropole reported that at least 12 Haitians were injured in Cap-Haitien.

The protests apparently began in Cap-Haitien early Monday and within hours had paralyzed much of the northern port city. An Associated Press television cameraman trying to reach the area was repelled by protesters throwing rocks and bottles from a barricade.

As the day went on, other protests broke out in surrounding towns and the central plateau. Local reporters said a police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and rocks thrown at peacekeeping bases. A small protest was also reported in the northwestern city of Gonaives, but UN police said it ended peacefully.

The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH, dismissed the protests as politically motivated, linking them to the fast-approaching Nov. 28 presidential elections.

A woman covers her face from the smoke of burning tires set up by demonstrators in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Monday. (Emilio Morenatti/Associated Perss)

“The way events unfolded suggests that these incidents were politically motivated, aimed at creating a climate of insecurity on the eve of elections. MINUSTAH calls the people to remain vigilant and not be manipulated by enemies of stability and democracy in the country,” the mission said in a statement.

Officials said investigations to determine if the protesters’ suspicions are correct will have to wait.

The UN’s World Health Organization said in Geneva on Tuesday that efforts should focus on controlling the disease, not determining where it came from.

WHO spokesman Fadela Chaib told reporters that “at some time we will do further investigation but it’s not a priority right now.”

The UN’s spokeswoman in Geneva, Corinne Momal-Vanian, described the suspicion that Nepalese troops were to blame for the outbreak as “misinformation.”

The cholera backlash plays upon some Haitians’ long-standing resentment of the 12,000-member UN military mission, which has been the dominant security force in Haiti since 2004. it is also rooted both in fear of a disease previously unknown to Haiti and internationally shared suspicion that the UN base could have been a source of the infection.

Death toll tops 1,000

The country’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll had passed 1,000, hitting 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

Aid workers say official figures may understate the epidemic. while the Health Ministry says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders said its clinics alone have treated more than 12,000 people with cholera and cholera-like symptoms.

Cholera had never been documented in Haiti before it broke out about three weeks ago.

Suspicions quickly surrounded a Nepalese base located on the Artibonite River system, where the outbreak started. The soldiers arrived there in October following outbreaks in their home country and about a week before Haiti’s epidemic was discovered.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the cholera strain now ravaging the country matched a strain specific to South Asia, but said they had not pinpointed its origin or how it arrived in Haiti.

Following an Associated Press investigation, the UN acknowledged that there were sanitation problems at the base, but said its soldiers were not responsible for the outbreak.

Transmitted by feces, the disease can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

President René Préval addressed the nation on Sunday to dispel myths and educate people on good sanitation and hygiene.

But sanitary conditions don’t exist in much of Haiti and the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country’s major population centres, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. Doctors Without Borders and other medical aid groups have expressed concern that the outbreak could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.

In the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, health officials banned used clothing from being sold in outdoor markets along the shared border as a precautionary measure to stop the disease’s spread.

Even with those precautions, the Dominican reported its first confirmed case of cholera on Tuesday. Officials said the case involved a Haitian citizen who had recently returned from his home country. The Dominican never had a confirmed case of cholera until this year.