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Follow us on TwitterHaiti Earthquake Recon: The Great Port-au-Prince Adventure Continues
Posted by Walt Vernon on April 13, 2010 at 6:38pm
AHH--view from the roof where the volunteers are bedded down. Note the incinerator & trash dump behind the hospital.
So, we spent today driving through Port-au-Prince (PAP) and visiting with various people in various Ministries of Health. It is not entirely clear to me how the government is organized, but we met with an engineer from the Ministry of Health, and with the Director of something called DOSS - Department of Sante & Sanitation (I probably have this wrong, but it is approximately correct). My concern is that I have now spent a lot of time studying Haitian hospitals and thinking about them, and in the context of what else I know about hospitals from the U.S., China, the UAE, Europe, and other places. I have heard that the government wants to spend $390M in building new hospitals, and I think it would be very easy to build a bunch of things that don’t work. I would like to somehow help not only the hospitals we visited, but also to formalize this knowledge and to help the Ministry rebuild its healthcare system in a way that can work and be sustainable for them. And so, I have been meeting with people and talking about what comes next. We have been very generously helped today by the Director of Project HOPE’s Haiti mission. He is a terrific guy named Charles. He has not been here long, but he is doing great work, and he should be supported.
Anyway, let me give some impressions of two more hospitals that we visited on Sunday.
As I wrote, Terry and I took our ultrasounds to Hôpital Notre Dame (HND), and then went to see the Adventist Hospital here in PAP. I think I remember writing about HND, so I will skip that one and go on to Adventist Hospital Haiti (AHH). This hospital managed to survive the earthquake without much damage. It is a two-story hospital, and was one of the cleanest facilities we saw. It was inside of a totally enclosed compound, and there were tents all over the place for, I guess, families of patients. One of the big issues here is the tent cities everywhere. In fact, speaking of tents, I have to tell you the story of one of the volunteers we met here, at Hôpital Sacré Coeur (HSC) (I know this is a diversion, but I told you recently I had given up on chronology for stream of consciousness; try to just hang on).
When we were boarding the plane from PAP to HSC, we were greeted by three lovely young women who asked us if we were going to HSC. We said yes, and they said they all worked there, and they would tell us about it as we flew. The three turned out to be a psychologist from Washington, DC, a Physical Therapist from somewhere else in England (sorry I forgot), and the Head of Nursing for the Volunteers at HSC. They were three of the most amazing people I have ever met. From what I could tell, they had descended en masse on the UN to get help for the patients from HSC. You see, the hospital, despite the expansion via tents, has insufficient space, staff, supplies, everything, for the demand. And so, they must discharge patients. The problem is, there is no place for them to go. Most have lost their homes and most have lost some or all of their family. So, they are being healed and then discharged with little help to rebuild their lives. It is when I hear stories like this that I get most saddened for these people. I have been thinking to myself, what good does it do me to tell them how to make their facilities better when there are so many remarkable people making do already with what they have; it is the healers who are making the difference? And then I hear from the healers their frustration - what good does it do to heal these people if they are then discharged with no place to go? The enormity of the problem is overwhelming. I was thinking the other day, ‘okay, so if I were President of this country, and I had 10 billion dollars, what would I do?’ And the problem is that the problems are so interlinked that it is very difficult to see any way out. It is a Gordian knot—as soon as you have addressed one problem, you find yourself facing a more intractable one.
The reason this thought is linked to the three superwomen will become clear momentarily.
When we landed in Cap-Haitian, we all gathered our luggage and headed for the exit. The girls, it turned out, had run out of money while in PAP. They were also running out of time, and, for reasons still not completely clear to me, somehow hopped on three motorcycles from wherever they were, and rode (I have visions of a female motorcycle gang) to the airport. What they did with the motorcycles I have no idea, but they had not had time to get money, so they were empty handed. Somehow, we thought they had transportation to the hospital and so they told us to take a taxi. We went outside into a chaos that outdid even the one from PAP. We felt almost suffocated there were so many people there trying to give us rides and take money and carry bags. I’ll tell you truly, it was disorienting, and I was not sure what to do; there was so much shouting and pushing, and grabbing. Even our big Army guys were feeling a little bit “Blackhawk downish.”
But then, to our rescue, came the three superwomen. One of them was all of about 5’ tall, and maybe 90 pounds. She kept pushing the guys back, and when they shouted at her “gimme dollar” she shouted back, in an engaging, laughing kind of way “no, you give ME dollar!” It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. One of the three, the PT (I love PTs ever since one saved my cervical spine from neck-fixing surgery) was busy negotiating a fare with a driver, while the one from Liverpool was defending us. And the psychologist was also pushing them off of us, and giving each of the five of us, somehow, directions, and confidence. At one point, in a gesture I will never forget as long as I live, a blind man told her “gimme dollar” and she said “you may be blind, but I am poor so you give me dollar!” And then, she hugged him. It was so clear that she an ability to connect with these people, and as people, not as victims. I have been in awe ever since. I think if I had just met these women, I would have been suitably impressed, But, seeing them thus made me realize even more deeply how wonderful the people are who are here, giving of themselves.
This one particular woman did two other things I was privileged to observe in my brief time there. The first night we were there, some of us were sitting around talking about various things, and she was asking about certain patients. One of the problems at a place like this is that volunteers come and volunteers go, and the hand-offs are not always perfect. There was one boy who had TB that had lodget in his spine. His father apparently simply dropped him off at the hospital and left and has never been back. This boy is bent over and can’t walk well, but he took our hands and led us around while we were there (he is the boy in the middle of the photo of Terry and I holding up three boys). This little boy had apparently stopped eating, and it had been missed. Because she comes back over and over, our psychologist (I am not using names to protect the innocent, but boy do I wish I could give the names of these people I think are true candidates for sainthood) somehow uncovered the fact that the little boy was not eating, and she raised Cain about it. She was able to work with the other volunteers there to make sure the boy gets fed. And then she had to leave on Saturday, a few hours before we left; I was sorry I was unable to say goodbye to her. But I have heard, since, that she is back in the states trying to gather up tents and get them to Haiti so that, when these people have to leave the hospital, they at least have some kind of shelter.
I don’t mean, by telling her story, to slight the others who are at HSC. I am very, very certain that there are more stories that are much more dramatic than these that happen hundreds of times a day, there. I have read some of them in the blogs and Facebook postings of some of the people I met. It is just that I was privileged to see this one person care so much, and use so much courage and relentless compassion, and I am in awe. The world needs more people like this, but there are a lot of them in Haiti right now.
I’m sorry, I just can’t write any more right now.
Comments
Arash told me about your trip to Haiti and passed on your blog contact info. Walt and John, we take my “hat off” to both you, this must have been a very difficult trip, both physically and emotionally.
Your blogs clearly document the devastating effects of the earth quake and the need for us all to do something to help the people from Haiti.
Regards
Paul and Lia Marmion
Walt- thank you for sharing this fascinating information. I stumbled across this blog because M+NLB is working with my firm on the Tulare, CA hospital expansion project.
I enjoyed reading your front-line, narrative style account of your work in Haiti. Your post highlights the challenges that health care providers and hospitals face in less-developed nations and gets my mind churning concerning the solutions to some of these challenges. Thanks for sharing this experience with the rest of the world.
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