He endured a fitful, 36-hour trek to Haiti, bearing witness to "worse than imagined" devastation, and sweated through a long day treating scores of injured under war-like conditions.

But it wasn't until he reached his earthquake-rattled medical clinic on a 6-acre compound in the foothills of Port-au-Prince that physician Jeffrey Randle broke down.

"All those years. All the great memories," said Randle, who spoke to The Salt Lake Tribune Wednesday from Haiti by cell phone. "I nearly wept."

Randle, a rehabilitation specialist at St. Mark's Hospital, founded Healing Hands for Haiti 12 years ago, a charitable nonprofit that delivers free physical rehab to disabled Haitians too often shunned as broken and beyond help.

It started small on a shoestring budget, but has flourished in a land where countless humanitarian groups fail. The charity's $400,000 budget supports the clinic and a shop where Haitians are trained make prosthetic limbs and do therapy.

Before Tuesday's deadly earthquake, plans were under way to build a rehabilitation hospital.

"Now we're almost back to square one," said Randle, who suspects rebuilding will cost $4 to $5 million.

Anxious since the quake to return to Haiti to assess damage to the Healing Hands compound, Randle was able to secure a spot on an LDS Church-sponsored medical mission, which departed Salt Lake on Sunday.

The group of 18 doctors and nurses was waylaid by flight delays and bottlenecks at the Haitian airport and were diverted to the Dominican Republic, where they loaded onto two buses.

"Ours had pink fringed curtains, which was certainly a nice touch," noted Randle in a blog post. The team arrived at the Haitian border at the break of dawn on Tuesday.

Initially, the outskirts of Port-au-Prince "looked as I had remembered," wrote Randle. "Controlled chaos in the streets. Vendors crying, brightly painted lottery kiosks, cars honking, people hurrying and shouting."

But the sky was littered with military planes and just beyond the airport were thousands of sheets draped over sticks and building after pancaked building.

"My heart sank. This was worse than I imagined," said Randle.

The group then drove the Central LDS Chapel near Champs de Mars where 500 displaced church members are living. They built a makeshift clinic in the bishop's office, treating infections, cuts and fractures, said Randle, who accompanied one woman with a crushed arm to Sacre Coeur hospital for surgery.

"A year ago, Sacre Coeur was the newest, nicest private hospital in Haiti. A large fountain with turtles swimming in it graced the entrance," states Randle's blog. "Today it looked like a war zone with hundreds of people lying on the ground or waiting patiently in long lines to be seen."

The crew slept that night at a property 20 miles north of the capital owned by a man who does engineering work for the LDS Church, said Randle.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, they were awakened by a 6.1 magnitude aftershock. Though rattled, the mini-temblor posed less of a threat than the prospect of heavy rain, said Randle. "There's talk of evacuating half the city. They're afraid debris and disease will be washed into the fields where people are sleeping."

Wednesday was spent treating more injured at the Central Chapel, which is adjacent a hospital where surgeons spend their days amputating limbs, said Randle. He said medical workers are starting to make headway with the most severe cases being transported to the Dominican Republic.

"Our docs were a little frustrated yesterday, because they had hoped to get in and start treating people more quickly," said Randle. "But they've had their fill of it today."

Randle and his colleagues planned to stay overnight at the Healing Hands compound. The guesthouse is serviceable and secure. And Randle learned that one of his groundsmen who was presumed dead actually survived by jumping from the window of a six-story building that collapsed in the quake.

He plans to return home later this week, and again to Haiti "as soon as possible."

kstewart@sltrib.com