lisainhaiti: Tuesday & Wednesday

Both Tuesday & Wednesday's clinics were held in Saint Marc, a coastal port town 100km north of Port-au-Prince. Each day we drove back and forth each day between Saint Marc and Cabaret, by school bus, about a 1.5 hour drive. We got to see some of the Haitian country-side; a mixture of pebble-littered barren pastureland, and some mountainous treed regions. Saint-Marc was not nearly as affected by the earthquake, however, not a single medical team had visited the town in 3 years, so we saw just as many desperate cases.

In the maps below you can see where Saint-Marc is located relative to Port-au-Prince, and the epicenter of the earthquake.

Unfortunately, Tuesday began on a very stressful note, when our school bus struck an elderly, nearly blind pedestrian who cut out in front of the bus. Fortunately for everyone involved, we happened to be a bus full of medical personnel, medical supplies, and local translators. Our team worked together to get her stabilized, with IV, and immobilized on an old door/make-shift spine board, and transported her to a local hospital (well two, since the first hospital wouldn't take her). The team paid for all her medical expenses, and by the end of the day, the news was very optimistic that she would make a full recovery. We arrived in Saint-Marc several hours late and began to set up for another full day of clinic. Understandably, many people on the team were pretty shaken up. There are very few pictures from this day, my mind wasn't really there, and once were were at the clinic, we were BUSY. This photo was taken out the bus window while we waited outside the second hospital for news, and to collect our team members who were inside assisting with the pedestrian case.

Clinic in Saint-Marc was on the top floor of a church. You could climb up onto the room (which is where I sneaked away to for a few minutes, to nibble on my stale white bread & peanut butter sandwich). Many of us sneaked up to the roof to eat out "lunch" since it feels almost wrong to eat (no matter how basic the food) in front of people who may only get one meal that day.This is the view from the roof.

Here is one of the temporary treatment rooms:

Here is part of the clinic set up. Triage was in the left corner, registration in the center at the back, and in the front of the photo you can see benches set up for the education part of the clinic.

In between nutritional consultations, I spent most of my time helping out in pharmacy. I became very familiar with a lot of the drugs we carried, and their dosing. Lisinopril (for hypertension) was one of the most frequently prescribed drugs. Each time, I counted out 90 little pink pills (a 3-month supply). Some of the drugs were purchased by the team (using the money we fund-raised), while other were donated by pharmaceutical companies.

The patients I saw mostly suffered from diabetes, hypertension or malnutrition. I was very surprised to see as many of these cases as we did in Haiti. It had a lot to do with caffeine and excessive salt intake, and stress. While there were a few "interesting" cases (AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid), most of the cases in Saint Marc were in the same spectrum as the cases we saw in Faveau. One patient came in with albinism, and her skin was very severely affected by the strong Haitian sun. She was also 4 months pregnant, and had very poor eyesight. We provided her with prenatal vitamins, sunglasses and a hat, and some medication for some of her other health issues.

By the time we had finished and packed up, we were all ready for a quiet, uneventful ride back to Cabaret. But it was not to be. Less than 100 meters away from the clinic, we somehow got wedged between a dump trunk and cement wall, in an alley, with a traffic jam building up on either side. In this picture you can see how the dump truck was right up beside the bus. The bus would inch forward a couple centimeters, and the dump truck actually moved UP (accompanied by that terrible metal-on-metal sound). Many people were yelling in Haitian, and people were honking, but no productive solution seemed to emerge for quite some time. After a while it became obvious to the dump-truck driver (and the bus driver) that we weren't getting past each other, and so we started inching backwards, but by then traffic had built up on either end and it was just one huge traffic jam. Did I mention we were in an alley with 10-foot cement walls on either side? Traffic accident number 3 (we did eventually get out of this sticky situation too).

A few hours later, safe and sound back in the dorms, I found this little guy hiding under my pillow:

The following day, we returned to Saint Marc, and I managed to get some more pictures of everyday life in the town. No wonder there are so many accidents involving motorcycles. They ride 2 or 3 people on these tiny motorbikes, without helmets, and 3 bikes wide on the road! This is not just a lucky photograph, it was pretty common place.