In the space of ten days last month, Wesly Guiteau estimates that he helped 10,000 survivors of the earthquake which hit Haiti.

No small feat for a man who had never done any aid work before in his life — and the 39-year-old isn't finished yet.

Wesly jumped on a plane and returned from Bermuda to his homeland soon after the magnitude seven quake struck just outside of Port-au-Prince.

"I felt powerless," he says. "I was angry, I was frustrated, I was afraid for my family and I said: 'I need to be on the ground.'"

His goal was to evacuate those rendered homeless and helpless in the capital to his home city of Lascahobas and find his 34-year-old brother Jean-Claude, who had not made contact with their parents since before the January 12 catastrophe.

Like the rest of the world, Wesly had seen the horrifying images on television in the days after the earthquake but nothing could have prepared him for the reality.

"When I got there it was just a million times worse," he tells The Royal Gazette. "I didn't see a lot of bodies, particularly because we didn't go to certain areas.

"But the devastation was horrendous. In terms of real impact on me, I think it was the sheer amount of people on the streets and the lack of expression on their faces.

"It's almost like walking zombies. They look at you but they are looking past you. It was virtually everyone in Port-au-Prince and this was on the fourth or fifth day after it happened."

Wesly's initial aim was to hire buses to transport evacuees to Lascahobas but it became clear once he arrived there that the best thing he could do was take aid to the camps set up for the growing mass of internally displaced persons.

He quickly rounded up a group of young volunteers and made contact with the local mayor, whose office provided him with a truck and a police escort.

As he and his team began delivering the goods he had bought in the Dominican Republic to the camps, colleagues back in Bermuda were working hard to raise funds for his efforts. The cash paid for fuel, food, water and other vital supplies.

"It's gone from zero to $18,000," says father-of-two Wesly, an insurance broker at Willis. "The response we got was just phenomenal."

Although he'd never organised relief efforts before or experienced an earthquake, Wesly reckons that small-scale initiatives like his can be the most effective in the early stages of a disaster.

"In these cases, it takes very little for us to mobilise and go and do it," he explains. "We have reached at least 10,000 people."

Happily, Wesly discovered that Jean-Claude, 34, and his family were safe just before he set out on a trip to Port-au-Prince. Though their home was intact, he collected them and brought them back to Lascahobas from the capital.

But tragedy was never far away while he was in Haiti. His cousin's five-year-old son was killed and he attended the funerals of several friends.

"I didn't really feel any emotion," he admits. "There was so much going on in my head. It was just like constant movement back and forth. I didn't have time to grieve and I don't think I have had time yet.

"The closest I got to feeling emotional is at Miami airport [on the way back to Bermuda] where I picked up a Newsweek magazine and started going through it.

"There were tons and tons of pictures; very, very vivid pictures of the devastation and the dead. One had a pile of bodies and that's when it hit me. I was right in the middle of it and I didn't even see it."

He describes how his truck was flagged down en route to Port-au-Prince by crowds of people on the roadside.

"Some were watching, others were crying," says Wesly. "There was a man who had been under debris for six hours. We got him in the car and drove off.

"He was not unconscious but he was not talking. When we got to the hospital we got to a room and there were about three nurses there. Nobody was helping him and eventually I said: 'Do you know anything about triage? If you don't help him, he'll die.'

"They all jumped up and started dealing with him. I think they are indifferent because they are seeing so many people."

Wesly — who lives in Pembroke with his wife and two sons, aged five and three — arrived back in Bermuda on January 24.

Since his return, he has met with and given advice to various local organisations planning relief efforts in the shattered Caribbean country, including Cornerstone Foundation.

But he's itching to get back to Haiti and will return there later this week. In the meantime, his elder brother Guignard, 47, has gone to their homeland to carry on the aid work and organise the team.

"It just needs someone to oversee it," he says. "Everybody else that we would give the operation to, they are all in need themselves.

"Also, if you leave it up to them, they'll probably not go to Port-au-Prince, because they'll want to help people in the town. But the truth is that the supplies are not getting to the people in Port-au-Prince — and they need to."

• To read more about Wesly's efforts visit www.directhaitirelief.com. Money can be donated via the Haiti Village Health Bank of Bermuda account number 010-871135-001. Put either "Lascahobas Relief" or "Wesly Guiteau" in the memo part of the transfer.