Are we really investing in communities?

            Yesterday was a great clinic day. I spent a second day working with Dr. Pierre, who speaks no English, but is good enough to repeat complicated words for me and even write them down.  She started asking me clinical questions, what would be my diagnosis of this situation.  Interestingly, her differential diagnoses are pretty slim.  A patient who presents for fatigue without fever is automatically diagnosed with nutritional anemia, after all her diet is probably poor.  Despite that many “field lab tests” available for checking hematocrits (ranging from spinning tubes which require electricity to simply comparing a spot of blood to standard color ranges), this clinic makes the diagnosis presumptively. 

           

            We saw this beautiful smiling baby in consultation.  Mom started talking about how she was sick, and the doctor took the baby, started playing, and reassured mom that she was fine.  (Apparently, mom really brought the baby in for the free sandwich.)  We each played with her for a bit and gave her back to mom, who then got her sandwich.  Then mom came back a little later, handed me a sleeping baby and ran off to do errands.  Yikes!  My first question was, “Eske ou pral returne, wi?”  (You’re coming back, right!?!?)  For all the talk of abandoning children around here, I had a right to be worried… 

            I think it’s really fascinating how much effort foreigners put into building and maintaining “orphanages” (a term which disturbs me greatly, because they have parents!).  Don’t get me wrong, I believe that children should be loved, schooled and fed, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could do that while living with their own families.  Haitian mothers and fathers love their children, just like we all do.  And I find it absolutely depressing that some of them feel so desperate that they feel the need to give their children away, thinking someone else can do it better.

            Fortunately, economically viable communities don’t need orphanages.  Communities that produce allow parents to raise their own children.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest all of that money into capacity building and training programs so that families could stay together?

            Needless to say, mom came back.  Her community, though it still has a few cases of malnutrition and struggles with various social problems, has a cooperative.  They have worked with PCH for a long time.  The people of Delis are productive, and they feel fully capable of raising their own children.  That’s pretty remarkable.