Haitian hospitals, Medicine food and Creole lessons

Child with Kwashiorkor symptoms.

It has been a week and a day since I arrived in Haiti, but it feels like longer. There was a funeral at Canaan for a man of Montrouis, and I have part of the tune stuck in my head. It reminded me of a New Orleans jazz funeral –- several trumpets and a trombone player played a lively waltz rather than a somber melody. It was a colorful affair, which I peeked at through the steel-barred clinic windows.

I had my first Creole lesson today! Pastor Joelle’s wife taught us the Creole Alfabét, which is almost exactly the same as French, and some basic classroom vocabulary for the women working as English teachers.

Here are a few works of the day that will be useful for the clinic, especially when directing patients to their place while taking vitals:

Chita (la) = sit (here)

(Pa) kanpé la  = (don’t) stand here

Sòti  = go out

Rantré/ antré = come in

My morning was rather monotonous. Katie and I resumed cleaning the clinic storage room and sorting supplies that we think need to be donated to the local hospitals. I’ll be typing the list for Sister Gladys this weekend.

We had to put a lot of supplies in a trash pile for being either trampled in the chaos, covered in dust or bug bits, and some once-sterile containers chewed through by rats. It was also frustrating to see so many surgical supplies YEARS past the expiration date, thrown messily in rotting boxes. It’s fantastic that American medical supply companies are donating to Haiti, but medicines and wound prep kits “good until 2001” aren’t ideal.

View of the mountains through the Mamba truck window, on our way to Rousseau Hospital.

We sang along to Adele from my iPod Touch until our feet were gray from shuffling around in dust.

Here’s my reflection of the day: Why in the world would a rural primary care clinic need Foley catheters, sterile bone saws with leg amputation bags and around 1,000 surgical gowns? It may be a dream down the road to offer care in emergency situations, but for now Canaan doesn’t have the resources (or the space!) to store these supplies. They need to go where there’s a pressing need or them, like the hospitals in Pierre Payan, St. Marc and Rousseau, with specialty doctors on staff to address these needs. Otherwise they’ll end up like the pile we trashed—dirty, rat-eaten and unusable.

Yesterday I woke up with nausea and abdominal pain. I had to sit with my head between my knees so I wouldn’t start dry heaving at breakfast. The change in diet has disrupted my digestion, but who knows exactly what set it off. However, it was a busy day and I had no time to take it easy.

Doctor Jean Robert prescribed me some medication that the pharmacist, Henry, only gave me after teasing me in drawling French. Katie and I, along with Mis Elise and a translator from Canaan, hurriedly loaded the Mamba truck and drove 45 min to Rousseau, a hospital and health center deeper into the mountains than Montrouis.

It was the bumpiest drive I’ve ever been on. We passed a thick river, with naked children washing laundry and stretching linens to dry over skull-white stones. With their thumbs out like hitchhikers, people from Montrouis hailed us to stop so they could jump in the bed and catch a ride along the steep road.

The hospital was nice, but crammed with people waiting for consultations. We set up the Mamba supplies as mothers and grandmothers lined up on a crooked bench. Some of the children were so malnourished that their ages were indiscernible. A mother brought her 5-year-old son, smaller than the 2-year-old I babysit back home. He weighed a shocking 11 kg. An 8-year-old girl weighed only 14 kg, but could not be admitted into the Mamba program because of her age. The nurse gave her bags of rice. We also gave every family we saw to large bags of dehydrated soup – aid for parents as shriveled as their sick babies.

Here, food is medicine.

Rousseau Hospital. My camera was fogging up all day.

We admitted a new baby into the program that had severe edema (swelling) of his legs and belly. The edema is a symptom of Kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition when the diet doesn't provide enough protein. He looked like a cartoon, his skin suctioned to his rib cage, while his legs and belly swelled like balloons. He was burning up with fever, but we were out of antibiotics. It was horrible feeling to let him leave without proper medication. 

We finished the Rousseau Mamba consultations at noon. After a quick lunch at Canaan, Katie and I drove one of the young mothers and her sick 6 mo. old baby to the hospital in St. Marc for a chest X-ray. A doctor living in the states who serves Canaan in his spare time agreed to take on the baby as a patient. She has strange dimples in her chest, as if her rib cage has been pushed too far back. There’s strangeness in the way it juts, and the baby sounds like she has pneumonia or some kind of lung infection.We didn't have to wait too long for the X-ray, and there were no lead coats for protection. I stepped outside to put a cement wall between my body and the radiation.

I saw my first Emergency Room in Haiti at the St. Marc hospital. It was a large room, smaller than a waiting room from one of the hospitals I work at in Baton Rouge. Mismatched beds were squeezed together like an infirmary. The room was hot and still, except for a single ceiling fan. I can't imagine laying in that stagnant heat for treatment.

I was exhausted and still felt sick after the long day. After dinner, I fell immediately asleep and did not wake up until 6 am this morning: 11 hours, through the generator being turned on and off, without moving. I’m feeling better, but the pain comes and goes.