After more than a month of returning from Haiti, and a few glasses of wine into the night, I am finally sitting and taking the time to "have at it" with my experience with the aftermath.
Pictures can tell a lot and so can news casts and magazine articles, but nothing will bring it home like an actual visit. I was there for only a week, so I claim no ownership in the rebuild. However, it brought out every emotion you could imagine and even though I saved a few lives, it is devastating to think about how such a resilient people have been blasted yet again.
I sit nervous in my cushioned airplane seat and wonder how the following 8 days will go. I try to remind myself that this is exactly why I went into nursing...to work with those who have nothing. To provide a skill that can help people live healthy lives. To see different cultures...to travel the world.
Like most developing countries, there is no rhyme or reason to orderly things. Lines don't exist, wait times are extravagant and I am certain that the metal detectors we walked through on touch down were turned off. Very typical. We gathered outside the terminal with an unwelcoming swirl of humidified heat to find a mass of Haitian hands grabbing the rails of the gate. A million little eyeballs fixed to the newest crew of white volunteers. We couldn't decipher if they were welcoming stares or angry glares. Either way, it felt intense from the moment we landed.
Project Medishare is a partnership with the Miami Global Institute offering relief to the victims of the earthquake. Putting us 2 months after the quake, I anticipated my time at the makeshift hospital to pair more with medical surgical wound care than trauma resuscitations. We had a taste of everything. The Emergency room was set on gravel and the OR was hidden between shelves of surgical supplies. With its 70 bed adult ward and more than 50 pediatric patients, including the very first and only NICU and PICU, it was an oasis in the sultry heart of a burning dessert. It was a full force of multi-disciplinary teamwork, in the middle of the poorest country in the western hemisphere.
I could rant on about the discomforts that come with 105 degree work days and the truth that came from being hungry and itchy, but I guess that you get the point. I know that for most volunteers, the reality that home was only days away, gave serenity in our nearly flattening heat coma. The UN, blesstheir unorganized presence, provided cold beers and french fries for our moments of starvation, not to mention endless entertainment of Bolivian soldiers shaking their Latin hips to songs from a crusty radio.
It was more than sad. The roads were nearly impassible. Intersections completely blocked by fallen debris. Most buildings pancaked to the point of unrecognizable cement. The government building, which once stood so white and round, had completely capsized and stood on its side. Schools gone. Hospitals gone. Bike lanes....not a priority.
Every week, the hospital would open it's iron clad gates (barbed wire) to fresh volunteers. On average, people stayed for a week only, some opting to extend. A large white circus tent erected as our lodging with rows and rows of cots. They were actually quite comfortable and if you were lucky, which I was only after my first assigned area flooded, to be placed in the back left corner where the air conditioner blasted your brains out, then sleep came with ease. If you were a night shifter...which praise Allah I was not, you would have to endure the balmy hundred degree day temperatures which made for a toasty nap. No one could complain. It was shelter and pretty cush for Haitian standards.
Locals would arrive at the hospital early in the morning to sit for hours in hope they would be seen by a doctor. Just like in the states, it was common to see everything from complaints of headache and fever all the way to full thickness body burns and car crashes. At triage, it was our goal to pick and choose which patients needed immediate care as our goal at Medishare was to serve as the trauma center and emergency room only. Imagine looking upon a row of the thin and ill, and handpicking a select few who are to be seen by a doctor. Horrible. All other complaints were referred to outside clinics and the county facility.
Except for the children. We held no restraints on the children. Every baby was given oral rehydration bottles and brought into the shade. Most were admitted for malnutrition, typhoid, malaria and oddly enough hydrocephalus, a condition that literally means "water on the brain". It was shocking. There was such a high number of babies born with this disorder it made us think there was something in the water or perhaps, a lack of water. The brain swells to astronomical size because intracranial fluid can not regulate normal levels and drain properly. The pediatric ward looked like a room of bobble heads. The solution? Surgical placement of a shunt that allows passive drainage. The amazing thing? The surgeries were possible as there were world class surgeons readily available in our world class open air operating room.
It was really incredible. Hard to find the right word to sum it all up, but I am glad I went, I am glad it is over, I want to go back, I hate really hot places, I love speaking foreign languages, It is frustrating being lost in translation, It was really funny, It was terribly devastating, I saw reality, Things and people can be faker than you think...
A link for my pictures. I am not the best at whipping the camera out to snap photos, but here are the few I gathered.
