Awoke this morning to the news of the 8.8 quake in Chile. The aftershocks have been huge as well. It's hard to imagine how the resources; physical, personnel and emotional, can stretch for another disaster of this magnitude. How can we, the people of the world, stay motivated to help when we are overwhelmed by news of disasters over and over?
The people of Haiti are in no way ready to lose any of the relief assistance that is there, in fact they need more, but relief organizations are going to need to pull out of Haiti in order to respond to Chile. This will put more responsibility for the long term relief on to the established/traveling clinics, hospitals and smaller aid organizations and the short term volunteers who are helping them.
Each of us need to be thinking about how we can assist everyone else in this world...we never know where the next disaster could be... It could always occur in our own back yard.
Many of you may remember me talking about our Haitian nurse/my roommate. Fabiola came over with us to La Romana. I've had the chance to meet one of her sisters, brother (Alex) & his family today. I learned that Alex is a translator for the "Batey" (Haitian sugarcane villages here in DR) clinics and a university student on the weekends in Santo Domingo. He had come out to Haiti in one of the first two weeks to translate for the medical teams and to find Fabiola. He was the one who arranged for Fabiola to work with the medical teams. Just before leaving Haiti, Fabiola's other sister, Abigail, dropped by & I was able to meet her as well.
17h25 - Cyndi, the volunteer who is the Hospitality Assistant at the dorms here in La Romana, took two of us to the Good Samaritan Hospital for a tour. The hospital currently has 20 beds, but third & fourth floors are being constructed for laundry rooms, rooms for 44 more beds and a top floor for rooms to house medical residents and nurses. Everybrick of this hospital has been laid by the hands of a volunteer or by donated money. Teams from all over the US, but mostly from NewEngland, come on a yearly basis to continue the building efforts and to deliver health care in the bateys. The dream is to become a teaching hospital with tropical medicine rotations.
The last few of days in Port au Prince were very good. Wednesday we went to a relatively small tent village on the back side of the airport named Cazeau. All of the tents were made of sticks and scraps of cloth. Very few had any plastic protection. Our team was invited to the community by a youth group named FISEH. At the end of the clinic the FISEH leader gave us an official "Thank you." They said that they were not able to help their community medically after the earthquake, but with our help they were able to give assistance and were greatful. I don't have access to the internet yet, but the backs of their T-shirts had FISEH.org written on the back.
This particular clinic was held in the front yard/driveway of a private home. They graciously cleaned a bed out of a room adjacent to the house for us to use for our pharmacy. There were stairs to the roof of the house where several of us went to sit under the shade of a tree. I was able to see the airport and the tent village from a very different perspective up there. Since this was a smaller village, we ended up seeing only 311 patients.
One of the docs had a thermometer with her on Wednesday. Clinic started at 09h56 with the temperature at 89°F and finished at 13h18with a temperature of 101°F. And we wondered why we were feeling hot and tired at the ends of clinics?
Thursday we went to another church in Carrefour, at Avenue Christock. To date this was the largest church in which we worked. How exciting to have lots of pews for seating at all of the stations: Vital signs, waiting for the "Providers", 15 spots with a "Provider", translators and patient seating (a doc at each end of a pew with over the counter meds for distribution in the middle), pharmacy line, de-worming medication line & finally the food and clothing line before exiting the church.
Four patients at this clinic stuck out for me. An older woman had an obvious goider on her thyroid, an obvious lack of iodine. A young woman by the name of Louise Germain had been hit on the right temple by a falling brick. T he cut had been sutured on 12 January, but she didn't have anyone to remove them till the 25th of February when I saw her. She was also having constant headaches with nausea since her head injury. T aking a little extra time to do some Cranial OMT really helped a lot.
The last two patients who come to mind were two very bright and curious little kiddos. St Jean is 3.5 years old and Delancy is 6. Neither of them had anything seriously wrong with them, but it was their smiles, friendliness and curious minds that kept my attention. I keep wondering what type of education these two will ever get coming from this very poor community.
These two little ones were the ones I ended up giving the two signed stickers I had brought with me. Two of my US kiddo patients had each given me a sticker to give to a child in Haiti. I had taken photos of my home patients holding the stickers. I gave the photo with the sticker to the Haitian children. Their faces lit up like stars. They were even more excited for me to take a photo with them and the photo and the sticker. Now I'll need to make copies of these pictures for my US patients when I get home.
It's very late, after midnight.... There have been multiple interruptions to my writing today. Tomorrow I will try to post more memories before I forget them.