Sous-Bogne: The village down the hill

Just an anecdote I forgot to mention about yesterday: I walked to Sous-Bogne — a little neighborhood down the mountain from Canaan — with Katie, an Alabama med student and volunteer for the Mamba clinic, to meet with the mother of a 7 mo. old patient with an ectopic bladder. Katie needed their original birth certificates and ID cards to bring to the U.S. Embassy to get the family Visas. Without immediate approval to travel to the states, the little boy might miss the opportunity for surgery and risk disease and death.

The trash in Sous-Bogne (pronounced “sue boy”) was the first thing I noticed. The smell was next. The path was more shattered glass than dirt. Soggy cardboard and clothing, plastic detergent bottles and paint tins were strewn around concrete dwellings.

Tarps and screens woven from dried palm leaves crackled as groups of boys burst out, snickering and energetic as they played with plastic suture wrappers discarded from the clinic. Wiry, patchy-feathered chickens clucked under the walls of cacti and twisting succulents.

Katie told me Haitians build only when they have money, which explained the incomplete skeletons of cement and plaster scattered across the landscape. The missing slabs of concrete were often plugged with the woven-palm mats, worn blankets or even plastic jugs and garbage.

Just half a mile walk brings us into a staggeringly different living space. Just down the road, the resort Club Indigo houses upper-class Haitian vacationers, missionaries’ families, UN officials and foreign soldiers working in Montrouis. The gardens are pristine and manicured compared to the dismal grey, brown and muted greens of Sous-Bogne.

When we reached the house, Maddie, a 17-year-old from Canaan, translated. The baby was rolling on his back in the shade while his mother washed clothes in a large aluminum basin.

Le garçon has a grin-shaped slit on his belly where urine oozes from his kidneys. Since he is prone to infection, doctors are arranging a private jet to take him to Indiana to construct a bladder, close the opening, and possibly reconstruct genitalia. His penis never formed, and he has hernias on his testis. I don’t know whether or not his growth will be stunted, but he was a giggly, clingy baby with deep dimples and thin, loopy braids on his head.

It was sobering to realize the hurdles this infant and his family have to overcome to obtain adequate medical care.