Tragedy struck Haiti again this week, when the “chirpy, bright smiling” eight-year-old daughter of a Surbiton charity’s medical director was among four children killed when a school in the country’s second city was overwhelmed by a mudslide.

Kingston couple Carwyn and Reninca Hill have been in Cap-Haitien, which was left largely unscathed by last month’s earthquake, since December 2008, building the Haiti Hospital Appeal’s hospital and children’s home.

The area was hut by an aftershock and heavy rain on Monday afternoon, and Mr Hill found hundreds of people outside the school when he arrived with two UK medical volunteers. Dr Paul Toussaint and his wife waiting for news of their daughter Pascale.

Mr Hill said: “After an eternity of waiting, in which time we’d set up a small emergency room with our three stretchers, there was a sudden outpour of emotion. We all looked up towards the stairs where a group of panicked men charged down carrying the body of a young girl.

“Amidst the panic, they passed by our medics and threw the little girl into another ambulance on the scene. I hadn’t managed to catch a clear sight as to whether this girl was Pascale or not.

“However, just moments later, two little rucksacks were bought down from where the mud slide had taken place. I looked into one, left covered in mud, and their found a book with Pascale’s surname on it.

“A little while later news came through that the first child’s father had entered the ambulance. The man told us, ‘the girl’s father was a doctor’. ‘A paediatric doctor?’ we asked, ‘Dr Toussaint?’ The answer I’d feared returned. ‘Yes’.

“I wanted to scream out in pain. It’s as if all the dead people I’d seen in the past weeks since the earthquake came alive in my heart, as if all the pain and suffering I’d tried to hold in for weeks desperately cried out to be released.”

Since the earthquake, the US military has flown a number of casualties to the hospital by helicopter, the charity has ferried aid to the capital and 500 people sought treatment there on Monday, when a team of 30 medical professionals arrived for a week.

Ms Hill, who previously taught at Our Lady Immaculate Primary School, Tolworth, returned to the hospital last week, after two weeks fundraising in the UK, and said: “I was absolutely amazed by what I saw. The whole site has been transformed. People were busy working everywhere, on the buildings, in the clinic and in the hospital.

“We have one ward which is fully functioning and currently has 12 patients being treated inside. They are all paraplegics and quadriplegics and the care they are getting is outstanding.”

Treasurer Phil Johnson said the charity had received £200,000 in cash alone since the disaster, double its usual annual income, and would receive a quarter of the money raised at Naomi Campbell’s Fashion for Relief fundraising event at Somerset House this week.

To read Carwyn Hill’s blog and donate to the appeal, see haitihospitalappeal.org.