Always an adventure in Haiti

Well, I´ll start from Friday.

Another day at the clinic, crying children, infected wounds, etc. but it was better, because I was going, after work, to the house of the doctors I work with. We were going to eat pizza (Leo-style) and relax before heading out to one of their friend´s house, out in the country. Now, when I say out in the country, I mean it in every sense of the word.

Saturday morning, we woke up with the sun (which means about 5am here), ate a meager breakfast, got all our stuff packed for hiking and a day at a rural clinic, and walked toward Route Tabarre, the main road near the doctors´ house. We waited for a tap-tap to take all six of us: me, Dr. Leo, Dr. Jorge, Dr. Fernando, Natella (a Haitian wmoan who lives with the Chilean doctors and has been the cook and tour guide for the house for the last four years...she is marvelous), and Bonny, whose house we were going to stay at and who ran the rural clinic. He is not yet a doctor, but will be starting medical school in the Dominican Repubic in January.

We waited for a tap-tap to take all six of us, which didn´t happen, but the doctors saw a friend driving his moving van down the street, he stopped, and drove us to the tap-tap depot on the other side of town. We were bombarded with tap-tap drivers who all wanted the "blans" to take their tap-tap, because they all think that they can trick us into paying more than the fair share for a tap-tap ride. We´re blan, that´s true, but we´re not stupid.

One of the tap-tap drivers took one of our bags and threw it into his tap-tap, which was already mostly full and could maybe fit all six of us into the covered bed of the pick-up. Stuffed in, we made our way up into the hills above Port-au-Prince. I don´t know how we got up those hills, with about twenty people in the back of the unkempt car, but we made it somehow. Probably just with prayers and not much gasoline. Being jostled around for two or three hours is not much fun, but with beautiful scenery, such as the mountains in a tropical country, it is easy to forget how miserable the cities are.

Stopped finally at a widening of the road, which was the start of our trek into the jungle, as it were. At the trailhead were children dragging donkeys with spindly legs, heavy-laden with bags of charcoal or sugar cane, as well as women trying to sell mangoes and coconuts from their small farms. All six of us started walking, only Bonny knowing which way to go to reach his house. If I ever complained about hiking in the States (which I know I have...), I was getting serious pay-back for it. The roads got narrower and narrower the further we got from the road, and since it is a tropical country, there is plenty of rain and more than the fair share of mud. Leo slipped crossing one of the half-dozen swollen creek beds and his shoe was then covered with the clay-mud mixture. Natella and myself were fortunate to get a piggy-back ride from one of the men from the village (God bless him), and we continued on until we finally reached Bonny´s house, maybe a two hour hike from the road. A gorgeous hike, full of friendly people who are quick to smile and children who have never before seen a white person. It´s an eerie feeling to be gawked at by children, but they are like their parents, polite and curious and all smiles.

Bonny´s house is a small shack, made of concrete walls (quite sophisticated compared with the neighboring huts) and 2x6´s bolted together and hinged for a door. Thank goodness none of us are gaining weight, we couldn´t have fit through the door. Inside was a table with a lace cloth and bread and coffee and cheese. In his neighborhood, we were eating like royalty. We rested just long enough to eat something, then headed out again for the clinic. The clinic was just about the size of a decent size living room, with benches for the patients. We were on one side of the room, separated from the patients with a bedsheet hung from one of the cross beams, and that rectangular room separated into two rooms by another sheet. This made two exam rooms that were private enough for the patients to feel comfortable. (As a sidenote, most Haitians are not the least bit modest...they aren´t rich enough to be. When you hardly have enough money to buy materials to build a shack, let alone a place to go to the bathroom, and you have to pee in the same place as all your neighbors and bathe in the same stream as the rest of the village, you come to be very comfortable with the human body. Comfortable or indifferent.) I worked with Leo in one room and Jorge and Fernando worked in the next room. We saw patients with the flu, parasites, back pain (probably from osteoporosis or herniated discs or other preventable illnesses), consultations for birth control, and one man who I will never forget who came to see us because he had high blood pressure. I noticed he had a bulge in his mouth, like he had chew stuffed into the pocket of his gums. But he obviously did not have access to that sort of thing, so I asked him what it was, He opened his mouth and a tumor the size of his tongue engulfed the rest of his mouth. Leo told him he had to go to the hospital right away, since it may be a benign tumor or it may be cancer, we didn´t know. He seemed more concerned with the blood pressure, maybe because that was more uncomfortable than the golfball in his mouth, and he knew what would happen at the hospital...he would have to pay to get there, pay to see a doctor, pay for x-rays, pay for lab tests, and pay to come back home, without ever receiving treatment.

This is the most infuriating thing for me to see. People who have treatble diseases whose only obstacle is payment. Their lives could be saved if they could get to a hospital who would do x-rays, sonograms, consultations, diagnoses, and treatments for free. It seems like a lot, and it is, but that is for a major case. At the clinic, jsut today I saw a man who sliced open the bottom of his foot as well as the top of his big toe. It had swollen to about twice it´s normal size. He said it had been like this since September 7th, and he went to the hospital and got x-rays and medications, but he couldn´t go again because it cost too much. I don´t know if he had an infection or if he had broken any bones, and since the doctors aren´t at the clinic today, I can do very little. I can clean and bandage and say "come back on Monday to talk with a doctor". Most likely, he will have this wound on his foot for a very long time. It´s incredible the lack of medical treatment here.

But I digress. I was talking about the clinic... At around 2pm, we finished our work at the clinic. Went back to Bonny´s house, changed into our swmsuits, and took a very short walk to a stream where we swam and cooled off and enjoyed cleaning ourselves in the not-so-clean-but-oh-so-delightful water. Went back to the house for dinner and to listen to the small radio to the Colombia v. Chile soccer game. I could not understand anyof it, but by Jorge and Fernando´s reaction, I knew Chile was winning. I think the neighbors probably thought they were crazy (which they are, when it comes to Chile being in the world cup playoffs). Then to sleep on the concrete floor, all five of us side by side in a room maybe 8´wide and 10´long. Very cozy. And a bucket in the corner for a bathroom during the night.

The next morning, we headed out very early because Fernando had a fever all night and the next morning and he felt horrible. We hiked all the way back to the road, with less mud than the previous day, although we had a donkey carrying some coconuts and mangoes that Bonny´s sister was going to sell in Croix-des-Bouquets. That donkey almost didn´t make it all the way to the road, he got stuck in the mud up to his belly at one crossing, and had to be unpacked and pulled and pushed by Bonny and three assistants. Got to the road, took a moto to Sodo to play in the waterfall. On the way there, I managed to forget Leo´s advice about being careful about the exhaust pipe and I got second degree burn on my calf. Also, being stupid, I forgot to put on sunscreen and I got plenty burned, mostly on my forehead and shoulders. I look silly with a sunglasses tanline.

Enjoyed the waterfall, Fernando slpt and still felt terrible, so we took the motos to a nearby town to transfer to a tap-tap for 10 goudes (roughly 25 cents US). Then we began a new adventure. The tap-tap carried us about a mile up the winding road, the stopped because it had no water left in the engine. They can´t use radiator fluid, it´s to scarce, so they use water instead. When they opened the gasket, boiling water cam shooting in through the grate separating the cab from the bed of the moving truck. Nobody was hurt, just surprised and furious at the driver. And Fernando was trying to sleep and did not appreciate it as a wake-up call. This happened twice more as we were trying to get back to Croix-des-Bouquets, as well as a flat tire. So, three hours and 50 goudes later (they raised the price to pay for all the repairs the tap-tap needed), we were in Croix-des-Bouquets. Took another moto back to the doctor´s home, slept very well, although painfully due to the sunburn, and welt to work the next morning.

The week that followed will be in the next post, since I have already written a lot for this update. The next one will be just as interesting, I hope.