As many of you may know, I spent the last week in Fond Baptiste. What a breath of fresh air. I am delighted to say that some areas of Haiti work. (I find it interesting that the employees of PCH (all Haitian) have observed that the communities which are further from “blan influence” work harder, which appears to be true of Fond Baptiste.)
Fond Baptiste is about 2 hours of bumpy-rocky road from the main highway. It’s beautiful, green and cool. Claudio (a Chilean journalist, theologian, philosopher, photographer, and former professional soccer player) and I got to stay with a fairly well-off family. We still haven’t figured out the family structure exactly, but there are five people living in the house. One is a nurse, whose kids are grown and whose husband works in New Jersey. Another is an old man, Odny, and I have no idea how he’s connected. I’m still not sure which of many other people actually live there.
They have a live-in cook and two restaveks. Restaveks walk the line between slaves and adopted family members. Families who can’t afford to feed their children often give them to rich families with the hopes that they’ll feed and raise them. Sometimes that happens, other times unthinkable abuses occur. But these two, both around 12 years old, are happy and healthy, and one boy gets to go to school. Frankly, I’m sure there are just as many evils with the restavek system as there are in the international adoption system, and I’m not sure which is better.
Tuesday the folks from SADA showed up to tell me that I had the day off. Apparently they didn’t have any room for me in their truck, but they said they’d come back for me the next day. So I bumped into some neighborhood young people and asked them if there were any Flag Day festivities. We walked down to the parade together, and I got a tour of Fond Baptiste en route. After the parades we came back and played Dominoes, for a few hours. That night, when the nurse got home, we had “class” where we went through my Creole-English medical dictionary and pointed to body parts and joked about anatomy.
Wednesday and Thursday I worked with two different nurses at the mobile clinic. These nurses were actually seeing patients and writing prescriptions. They used the same methodologies as the doctors, iron for fatigue, ibuprofen for pain, antibiotics for cold symptoms, and anything they didn’t know what to do with, they sent to the doctor’s station. By Thursday, my Creole had gotten good enough that the nurse I was working with actually started asking my opinion. For example, we had one patient with a big sebaceous cyst, which was already coming to a head. He wanted the guy to go to a hospital for surgery (they don’t I&D in the field). I recommended that he try warm compresses a few times a day for a week, and then come back to the mobile clinic next week if it hasn’t popped. The nurse then gave him antibiotics and ibuprofen for good measure. He also let me counsel some patients in Creole, on avoiding salt and caffeine with hypertension and things to eat more of with anemia. I think the patients were as amused as I was to hear me explaining things.
Coming back to Port-au-Prince last night was like a homecoming. I hugged Betsy, Veniel and Katherine and all of my Walls family. I checked my emails (I had 196), chatted with Gary, Stef and Heather Borek, relaxed and went to bed early. This morning I celebrated by jump roping for thirty minutes and enjoying a non-bucket-bath shower. Life is good, and I promise I’ll have deeper reflections to come.
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