I met up with the team at the gate at 5:45, and we checked our 5 hockey bags of medical supplies and food, and got through security without any flaws. I fell asleep immediately upon boarding, and slept right through until when we landed in Miami. We arrived in Port-au-Prince around 3:30 in the afternoon. We loaded our gear into the back of two pick-up trucks, then crawled on top of the luggage and caught up with the rest of the medical team at the tail end of Friday’s clinic (30 team members have already been here for 4 days, and have run 3 day-long medical clinics).
The clinic was beginning to wrap up and seemed chaotic, but we’ve been told it looks more organized in the morning. In the end, 306 patients were seen at today’s clinic; a new record for the STIMMA team.
Clinic was about an hour bus ride from our main camp, in a town called Cabaret.
On the way to Cabaret, we passed by one of the large, sprawling "tent cities" where thousands of families are still living in make-shift structures after last year's earthquake.
We arrived at our home for the next 8 days, and settled in. Notice the bridge. Underneath the particle board the bridge has disintegrated right down to the re-bar. They were in the process of building a new one right next to it. We slept in dorms on the top floor of the gray-green building on the left. There was an orphanage at the back of the complex (21 young boys), and a school below us.
The first night in Haiti, I hadn't seen many mosquitoes, so I didn't put up my bug next. Most people were sleeping under bug nets, but our team leader wasn't, and said she hadn't had any problems. I had a large (at least 3 inch) frog hop right onto my face in the middle of the night. I was quite startled (but didn’t scream) and the frog jumped off my face onto the pillow. I was in a bit of a daze so I just sat up and stared at it on my pillow, for a bit, them nudged it off. It jumped onto the bug net on the bed beside me, so I pulled my sheet up over my head and went back to bed. It was a funny story the next morning, and as a result, I put up my bug net.
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