SMITHFIELD - Dr. Steven Landau heard the songs at all hours of the night. The music drifted up from church services and through the pane-less windows of his room in Port-au-Prince -- at midnight, 3 a.m., sunrise.

All through his disaster-relief trip, Landau heard Haitians "singing lovely songs, just beautiful songs, and clapping hands or being joyous," he said last week.

Each day, Landau rose with the roosters, then headed to one of the countless tent cities, where he and other volunteers treated dozens of injuries each day.

During his weeklong trip, Landau, a medical doctor, gave out medicine, splinted broken bones and sutured wounds. Arriving 10 days after the massive earthquake, he saw buildings turned to rubble and tent cities filled with hundreds of people.

When Landau and the rest of his crew from the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT) rolled into Port-au-Prince, many of the most gravely wounded had already been treated or had died, but countless more needed help.

"These people were not getting medical care," he said.

Once on the ground, Landau and his team worked efficiently, trying to keep their minds on their mission while the island nation still staggered.

AMURT, which has strong connections to yoga and India, is not new to disaster relief. Some of its veterans, like Landau, have deployed to epicenters and hurricane-lashed coastlines again and again.

Landau, who practices medicine in Smithfield, has been to Haiti about 10 times, and since 1988, he has helped out in Louisiana, Jamaica, Venezuela and Nicaragua after disasters.

On the way to Haiti, as he flew toward Santo Domingo, a city in the Dominican Republic, Landau found himself asking familiar questions. "I had no idea if we could be sure of getting in from Santo Domingo," he said. "I had no idea what medical stuff I was going to encounter." He had even packed a hacksaw, worried that he might need to do an amputation.

But from the get-go, things seemed to fall into place. Landau, a spiritual man who often meditates, saw grace in how things came together.

One patient reappeared several times during the trip, with his machete wound healed more each time. On another day, just as Landau teetered on a mental brink, with his supplies running low, another Johnston County doctor and the American military showed up at the tent camp where he was treating patients.

"I had lost it," he said, but it was "like the cavalry came."

And when the AMURT team couldn't find a ride home, their van driver from a week earlier materialized and arranged transport.

There was darkness too. Children in the street begged for supplies the volunteers couldn't give. Sometimes, Landau said, you had to "harden your heart."

The doctor sees a long path to recovery for Haiti. Yet, he thinks he has seen the beginning.

"Haiti needs to organize from the ground up," he said. Even before the earthquake, his group was already involved in efforts to rebuild communities there by establishing schools and children's camps, and fostering gardens and salt flats, he said.

To contribute, visit amurt.net.