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Follow us on TwitterHaiti Earthquake Recon: The First Day & A Bit About Hôpital Albert Schweitzer
Posted by Walt Vernon on April 08, 2010 at 6:47am
I am writing this blog from the guest house on Wednesday night. I feel like I have so much to write and so much to catch up on. As I walk through the halls of this hospital, I just keep thinking, how can I remember all this, how can I absorb it. It is so different, and so important, and I struggle to figure out how to communicate it all.
So, I left off yesterday, I think, as we were driving to Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS). Leaving the Visa Hotel, we all piled back into our little van, and off we went. We drove a painful hour back through Port-au-Prince (PAP), reaching the airport about 3:30. And then on and on and on through PAP. It was very slow traffic, and we passed through innumerable tent cities and other collapsed buildings. I wanted to just jot down quick notes of things I saw:
• People living in collapsed buildings
• People huddled around tables
• Wrecked cars
• Markets with vegetables
• Rivers with people washing in them
• Tip-taps (trucks that had seats in back acting like buses & painted in garish colors)
• Kids playing in the rubble
• Goats running free
But most of all, what I remember are the kids who came up to the car to reach their hands in and ask for a dollar. “Please, s’il vous plaît… please my friend… please help me.” It was really hard for me to watch. The two women who were with us finally shut the windows, forcing the kids out. The kids just weave in and out of the cars, looking for people likely to give them money. Other street vendors come through, as well, selling some kind of fried-looking things that we conjectured were plaintain leaves.
Eventually, after about what seemed like an hour, our driver swerved over to one side of the road, jumped out, and went running off. We all, sitting there in the middle of a mass of people, sort of looked at each other, wondering what was going on. It was a bit scary, I have to say. We took some comfort in the fact that our fellow Haitian passengers seemed unconcerned, but the conversation was a little strained. Finally, our driver returned, carrying a bottled iced tea – for himself! And off we went.
We pretty quickly then got into kind of a rural area, where we saw lots of goats and cows sort of wandering around. The country in this area has no trees – this entire area was devastated centuries ago. I read in my Lonely Planet Guide that the French Nation demanded reparations from the country after they became independent, and this debt required the deforestation of the country for the purposes of coffee and sugar plantations – all of which are now long gone. So now, it is kind of a scrub that reminded many of us of the southwestern U.S., down to the cactus.
We drove through winding road after winding road, climbing the mountains, seeing very little in the way of people. The road was lined with a deep trench on one side, probably for rain. At one point, we came upon a truck that had probably gone too fast and flipped over on itself over the trench. It was surrounded by a crowd of people, including UN soldiers. After that, we started noticing how windy the roads were.
About that time, we crested the mountains and began to see more people and homes. In fact, from that point onward, we thought the road was pretty much the center of life in this country. There were people and houses, and people selling stuff, and goats, and little businesses, and people walking all along the road. We would pull into a town, and the roads would turn from pavement into dirt. There was usually a big speed bump at the beginning of town, and another as we left. There were few road signs, but every once in a while, there would be a kind of randomly placed street sign.
The trip went on an on and on. We saw fields in the mountains on fire. People set these fires to clear the land for planting later in the year. Darkness fell, and on we drove. Later, the HAS chief facilities guy told us he was a little surprised we made it, because the vehicle had a broken tie-rod. But we did arrive, and we pulled up to a house that was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright for the people who started this hospital 50 years ago. The problem was, nobody knew that we were coming, we were kind of a surprise to them. But, they were quickly able to redirect us, and came to a compound that the hospital uses to house visiting volunteers and other people. There, we met a bunch more people from Project HOPE who are here to deliver medical care. We have an orthopedic surgeon from New York, two OR nurses from Massachusetts General Hospital, a midwife from Mass General, two physical therapists from somewhere, and others I am not sure of. The PTs are here to work with the big prosthetic lab to help the people who have had post-earthquake amputations.
We are living in a little house. The house has no running water except from 6-7am, 6-7pm, and 12-1pm. But that is okay, as you will see later. However, there is a pool outside for the people who stay in these houses. This resulted in John Pappas carrying buckets of water back and forth from the pool to fill up the toilet, commenting all the while on how much water it took – only to discover later that it had some kind of leak and was discharging about as fast as he was filling it.
But the real adventure started today.
This hospital was started by the Mellons of Carnegie-Mellon fame. Apparently, 50 years ago they wrote to Albert Schweitzer asking him about his work. He told them he had Africa covered, and advised them to concentrate on the Americas. Ultimately, they found Haiti and built this hospital. It is 80 beds, though saying that is really insane. The truth is, the place houses probably hundreds of people. At night, people line up outside the hospital waiting to get in. When you get into it, you will see people sleeping all over the place.
Actually, immediately inside the main entrance is kind of an outdoor plaza, surrounded on several sides by small offices and clinics. The largest area is an outpatient clinic, with lines of benches lined up for people waiting. Inside, people are lined up everywhere, in all stages of health and injury. The main hospital was built out of concrete. It is basically square shaped, with each side consisting of a double-loaded corridor and a courtyard in the middle. Two adjacent sides of the square opening off of the entrance clinic are basically D&T areas. The third wing is a single-loaded corridor, with surgery at one end, adjacent to Central Sterile, and, past that, a library and IT space.
But this is going on and on and I need to bring it to a close. Tomorrow we are to take a six-hour ride to the next hospital, and I will write more then.
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