An attempt to do this from another site off my ipad, I think I remember last time itwas not so successful. Getting to quaisi reliable internet is hard now that they have gotten very strict with border passing, I can no long flow freely on my "white face" visa,  my passport has no more pages left from all the stamps that now the guys are stamping over old ones.  I am staying tonight at my nurse's house on the Dominican side, she is a Haitian who trained as a nurse in the DR.  She has been working at our clinic for free for the last 6 months; she would rather not loaf around doing nothing and keeps advancing herself, hoping she'll eventually land something.  She ismy right hand- kind, efficient, energetic.  We back and forth in spanish and kreyol as we greet the women, wipe down for the next patient, add in a few salsa steps as we go.

A few words about this project - cervical screening for signs of precancer is rarelydone in places like this, in fact if you have the ways and means to get a Pap done, or even know what the hell it is, the next challenge is getting the results back, not to mention treatment for people who test positive.  I just read statistics from WHO that said cervical cancer is the number one cancer in women in poor countries; and the death is long and painful, you literally rot from the inside out.  "See and treat" was begun in the 1990s in Asia and Africa, where by using simple white vinegar and a decent light, a trained health care worker could diagnose precancerous lesions on the cervix and treat with cryotherapy.  A John's Hopkins set of very detailed manuals, at a site called jhpiego.com,  is a great resource and has been my bible leading up to this trip.  Many of the women here have never been screened, so I decided to begin on the first leg of the journey, improving my skills first and then supplying the clinic with the tools and training to do it themselves.  It has been overwhelmingly popular here, the clinic is crawling with women between 30 and 55 all day long, some waiting for hours.  This is a testimony to a band of health promoters who having been educating and recruting around the neighborhoods of Ansapit since last week.

Everything was perfectly in its place after the 80# tank of co2 arrived tied to the back of a guagua (ramshackel bus), which is what I use to do the cryo.  But the moment I hooked it up with the regulator attached to the cryogun, a torrent of freezing gas shot out accompanied with a undeniable pop and I knew things were changing course - voodoo in a bottle¿¿¿. The new unit the company in CT is sending me has been held up in customs for 3 days for reasons unknown, but i have faith that I'll have it in my hands soon.  The great thing here is that everyone here expects things to screw up so they are totally flexible and forgiving when it happens to you.


This guy came into the clinic yesterday spewing blood from a laceration about an inch long, right through the entire depth of his left nostril.  Talk about body piercing¡ He was sobbing and rather hysterical while I was sewing him up, and I felt sorry for him when he told me between heaves that someone came right up and stabbed him with a branch.  I told Peter, the guy at whose house I live in, about it later and he said, " Oh yeah, I saw that happen, he is a very bad boy.  He was trying to steal pepe (second hand clothes that had just arrived in a big fresh bundle off a truck container) from my mother so my cousin hit him with a rock.  Everyone knows he is a thief."