PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Dr. Ale Mitchell led Dr. Craig Hobar to a crowded room where a 2-year-old in pigtails whimpered for her mother. Emergency surgery had saved Euclide Decembre's crushed right arm. Then she'd been lost amid hundreds of earthquake survivors overrunning the hospital above the ruined city.

Without antibiotics or dressing changes, the toddler's arm had become infected. "We've been worried that we might have to amputate," Mitchell told her mentor, who'd just arrived from Dallas. A young man hovered near the crib. He was Euclide's cousin – her closest living relative after her mother died and her father disappeared in the quake.

Mitchell explained in French that Euclide needed more surgery. Walking out, she glanced at an index card with Euclide's name taped beside the door. In a hospital that lacked patient charts and most diagnostic tools, patients' histories had been reduced to cards. Euclide's had a question that could've been asked for any patient – perhaps for the entire country: "Post-op plan?"

Dallas plastic surgeons Ale Mitchell and Craig Hobar are determined to provide an answer. Through Hobar's Dallas medical foundation, they plan to bring volunteer medical teams from around the world for at least the next year to provide reconstructive surgeries for earthquake survivors.

Hobar says healing Haiti is a calling – one he's prepared for over a 20-year medical career.

Haiti's needs in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake are overwhelming. An estimated 300,000 were hurt, with a horrific number of crush injuries. Many with deep wounds need skin grafts. Those who endured amputations need reconstructive surgeries to be able to wear prosthetic limbs. Facial fractures will require complex reconstruction procedures. Exposed fractures will require delicate microsurgeries.

All that must happen a world away from high-tech medical centers such as Dallas, where plastic surgery patients get the best care that money can buy. Even before the quake, nearly half of Haiti's 10 million people lacked basic health care, and two out of three lived on less than $2 a day. Most of Haiti's 59 hospitals, along with 80 percent of the country's buildings, were damaged or destroyed. So Hobar and others hope to persuade home hospitals to form health care partnerships and help Haiti's hospitals rebuild.

"Either you say it's too enormous; there's no way; get me out of here – or you react like I hope we have: You say there's too much pain and devastation, and I can't fix it, but I've got to do everything I can to help," Hobar said.

"The first step is to step forward, to have a faith of action. Then God will make a way."

For Hobar, that has meant stepping away from a practice busy enough for several surgeons. The 55-year-old does cosmetic surgery at the Dallas Plastic Surgery Institute. He also repairs children's facial deformities and catastrophic injuries at Baylor University Medical Center and Dallas Children's Medical Center.

By Day Two after the quake, Hobar was so distraught over images of the carnage in Haiti that his wife and his office manager urged him to go. By Day Three, three national and international plastic surgeons' groups asked Hobar to help organize medical teams and logistical support for fellow specialists who wanted to help Haiti.

"Craig immediately said, 'I'll take care of this,' " said Dr. Renato Saltz of Salt Lake City, president of the American Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery. "I don't recall any effort like this [that] the specialty has responded to so quickly and positively."

On Day Four, Hobar wrangled a seat on a jet headed from Dallas to Haiti with a team from Forest Park Medical Center. He also helped Mitchell and her surgeon husband get to Haiti through contacts in the Dominican Republic. Once there, the Dallas doctors did round-the-clock amputations and trauma surgeries.

After three days in Port-au-Prince, Hobar returned to Texas to organize his medical foundation for a full-time presence in Haiti.

"I was totally hooked. And I left something that I knew was unfinished," said Hobar, a compact man with intense blue-gray eyes and infectious enthusiasms. "I saw all the mass disorganization down there from well-intentioned people, and I knew that there had to be a really focused effort. I also knew that reconstructive surgery would be a very long-term project."

In 1991, Hobar started a nonprofit, Life Enhancement Association for People, or LEAP, to fix children's facial and limb deformities in Third World countries. He organized its first medical mission to Haiti's island neighbor, the Dominican Republic. He'd started medical school there, so he felt a tie to the island. The medical missions are deeply rooted in his Christian faith and gratitude for his good fortune.

His foundation expanded into annual surgical missions to countries ranging from Zimbabwe and Laos, to Belize and India. "For many in these countries," Hobar said, "we've become the team of last hope."

Several years back, Hobar gave up a high-profile job as physician for the Dallas Stars to devote more time to his overseas mission work. And last fall, Mitchell became LEAP's first full-time physician after finishing a surgical fellowship under Hobar's supervision.

So LEAP was ready when the earthquake happened. The organization pledged $100,000 and soon spent more. While they readied for a previously planned 30-member team mission to India in late February, LEAP volunteers scrambled to mount a long-term presence in Haiti.

"It's a call to do our part," Hobar says. "If the air transportation comes, if the medical teams get their supplies from their hospitals, at some point, it will become relatively self-sustaining."

Within days, LEAP had hundreds of surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses from as far away as Germany and Turkey volunteering for week-long Haiti rotations. Donors also appeared when needed. Two Dallas businessmen offered private jets to get the first teams down from Texas. A third jet appeared with a Mississippi team that would stay in Haiti for an entire week.

Mitchell had been in Haiti for 10 days when Hobar returned with several LEAP Texas teams. The pony-tailed 33-year-old looked exhausted and relieved as she greeted them at the damaged airport in dusty flip flops, a blue Parkland scrub top and khaki hiking pants.

She beamed when someone called out, "We have a ventilator!"

"We have all these cases that are waiting!" Mitchell yelled back. A nurse with her explained that an ICU patient had gone into cardiac arrest hours before and badly needed that machine.

Driving through the ruined city, the LEAP teams stared at the devastation. Thousands of Haitians camped beneath sheets and cardboard. Signs in multiple languages pleaded for food and water. The tropical air was hazy with concrete dust and reeked of excrement and death. Few building remnants had spray-painted Xs, indicating that they'd been searched for survivors and bodies. One pancaked pile bore a spray-painted message: "Lots of dead people inside."

One LEAP team stopped at a hospital near downtown. The rest went to a community hospital in the hilltop suburb of Petionville. There, Mitchell had been camping on the hospital rooftop and pulling 15-hour shifts alongside medical personnel from Sweden, Korea, Japan and across the U.S.

That hospital had several hundred patients and their families jamming hospital rooms, camped in halls or living outside in tents. Running water was intermittent, creating huge sanitation problems. Electricity came from a diesel generator that sometimes faltered.

Swatting mosquitoes, the LEAP team set up a surgery suite in two rooms with ancient window-unit air conditioners and one rusty operating-room light. Their plan was to work to exhaustion, catch some sleep on the hospital rooftop and then work some more.

Hobar huddled with other doctors and relief officials for long-term planning. At one point, he volunteered LEAP's operating room and an anesthesiologist to a surgeon from St. Thomas. At another, he pushed a battered gurney through the crowded hospital hall, wrestled a big oxygen bottle onboard and ran it back for his team. The physician with office walls lined with accolades like "Texas Super Doctor" and "Dallas Top Doc" was happy playing go-fer.

"This is what mission work is all about," he says.

On the Texas teams' final day of surgery, Mitchell sat at the operating table and opened Euclide Decembre's arm wound. The toddler's infection was gone and her arm was healing so well that another team could do a skin graft later that week.

Then Mitchell cleaned and resutured wounds on a 15-year-old girl who lost one leg below the knee and had gaping arm wounds. The team closed her arm with a skin graft, but her leg stump needed help. Hobar rushed down a hall and returned with a saw-wielding hand surgeon from Rochester, N.Y.

The hand surgeon, Dr. John Elfar, briskly cut two inches of bone and a LEAP surgeon began shaping remaining skin and muscle so the girl might one day wear a prosthetic leg.

"Thank you, brother," Hobar called as Elfar left.

"Rock on!" Elfar yelled back, waving his saw like a gunslinger.

"You can't do this work too long. It'll break your heart," Elfar said later. "Still, it's not very often you feel like you've gone to the right place and done the right thing."

As they prepared to leave, the Texans marveled at Haitian endurance and faith. Grandmothers and children sang hymns and only winced at what would have made Americans scream. One woman patted a cross pinned to her hospital gown as doctors administered local anesthesia and cut dead flesh from her legs.

Another told her surgery team: "God sent you to me."

A Haitian man thanked Hobar for his promise to keep doctors coming. The man said LEAP volunteers were preaching a powerful silent sermon to their own country and answering Haitian prayers.

"I heard something important in front of the hospital. One lady was angry, saying that all these foreign doctors are here for their own interests," the man told the surgeon. "Another lady told her, 'No. No. These doctors are answering God's call to love one another.' "