It’s taken me awhile to process the week of Nov 2^nd and this is why this blog post is so late. Nov 2^nd was the start of torrential rain and also the arrival of one of our global health Hands up for Haiti teams. The team arrived and made their way to one of our communities called Bod me Limbe close to the ocean. I stayed behind with two of the trip members to finalize the plans for the rest of the week. What we didn’t know is that the rain had no plans on stopping any time soon. The weather reports here are far from accurate. The good news our team was safe and well taken care of by our Haitian staff! What I didn’t know was how badly the Haitians were affected, until Tuesday morning when I ventured into town to access the damage.

 

I could not believe my eyes. Homes were flooded, people standing outside in water past their knees in some places. One of the communities Hands up for Haiti supports and where our clinic is located was completely flooded. It is one of the slums, named Shada. The river had overflown into their homes, most of their belongings ruined. This is too common of an experience for these people. People were displaced and brought to safe shelters to protect them from the rain. Just when I thought I couldn’t see any more devastation I was shown by my Haitian friend a picture of a dead child on the side of the road that had drowned in the floods. I wondered why someone would leave their child on the side of the road. I quickly learned that parents put them there so the government will pick them up and give them a proper burial which they could not afford. During this visit I stopped at an area called La Fossette where we were going to do a clinic at on Friday. There I saw an awful site of people dragging a pig through tons of water and the sound that the pig was making was one I will not forget. Then I was told as I was getting back in the car that there was a knife fight happening down the road. At this point I could barely contain my tears.

 

Shada was the community our team was supposed to run clinics in on Thursday and Friday and there was no way we were going to be able to do that with the flooding. On Friday afternoon after most of the water had receded and we were able to access the damage of our clinic and community. What saddened me the most was the piles of people’s belongings in piles along the boulevard awaiting someone to come and take them away. A constant reminder of what they had lost. Mattresses were lying out in the sun drying out. We lost a lot of our medications that were located in the clinic and our medika mamba which we use for our malnutrition program there on Wednesdays. Tables, fans, scales, drawers, were all ruined. We knew we had to get our team back to Cap Haitian and away from the ocean. So Tuesday afternoon the team walked to a safe place that our vehicles could get to and made their way back to Cap Haitian. I immediately went into planning mode as basically all of our original plans had been ruined. Thank goodness for the all the lovely people Amanda and I have made connections with over the past 4 weeks here. The team only ended up missing one clinical day due to rain. On Wednesday we worked at an orphanage called Helping Haitian angels and saw over 100 children, some of who were very sick. Thursday we split the team some heading to Madeline an area that has a public clinic run by the local health ministry. The rest of us headed up to the mountainside to a clinic at Fort St. Bougeious; there we saw roughly 100 children. Friday was a very interesting experience that I had been working on with the help of one of my friends here for many weeks. The UN had informed us that they were aware of an area that really needed help; an area that had no real access to health care. It is known as “the ghetto”.  We saw roughly 150 children there and were impressed with the health status of these children. Most of them had minor health problems.

On Saturday we screened about 90 women for the HPV virus. If the swab comes back positive, which takes about 6-8 weeks then Dr. Jaeger who is from Minnesota will come back in the spring to do the VIA test and perform cryotherapy on positive woman. We had Haitian doctors and nurses working alongside the American nurses and doctors learning how to do the procedure. This is a program that I hope will continue into the future. My hope is that these women will be able to visit the hospital/clinic whenever they want to be tested for cervical cancer and that the Haitian medical professionals will continue to be trained in evidence based procedures. It was an emotionally exhausting week for all of us here on the ground. Please continue to keep the Haitian’s in your thoughts and prayers. They continue to be the most resilient people I have ever met.