Making contact

The open air Pedernales cinema has known better days

Bonjou mwen zanmi yo ,or 'hi friends' I returned to this foresaken bordertown a few days ago, feeling stragely at home, far less stunned by the heat, noise, absurdity etc that hits an innocent where it hurts when he first arrives. Many old friends and familiar places, and always, the delicious 'fria' or ice crested Presidente beer at the end of the day to help me study war no more!

My Hunter Thompson imitation

I still feel a little 'pants down' when I am in the heat of the battle, trying to speak in both spanish and kreyol, mixing them up incomprehensibly - except to my Darling nurse Jeanne who understands me in any language except english - at the same time that I am trying to be an efficient, sympathetic and competent health care provider. Sweating piggishly! I went up to the mountains with Jeanne to do some cervical screenings for the last 2 days, as we had been invited there the last time I was in the región. We caught a ride up there in a CARE vehicle, and the driver, a friend of Jeanne )who knows everyone), floored the thing, 50 MPH over the road of heavy rock, a nice new jeep getting beaten like a criminal, spitting stones the size of cantelopes in its wake.
 

Your CARE dollars going to a good cause

We made it there in good time but the clinic there is under construction so we had to set up in a little community center across the Street. Apparently the community health worker did not really do her job alerting the women, because no one knew we were coming, so we had to scramble to find someone to walk around town with a megaphone, which had no batteries. So after paying a guy for the batteries and sending him on his way with incentive pay, we were in business. We saw 15 women up there and I had plenty of time to spend teaching the technique to Jeanne, who will eventually be the supervisor of the cervical screening Project when I hand it over to the Haitians after the trainings over the next year. Banane is a funky, grimey town. The only thing I really like about it is its river and surrounding canyon which is gorgeous, a 5 minute walk out of town. I took a dip in the super swift current at dusk. I needed to get ready for a klonapin night, where I was sharing a lopsided matress with gray sheets in a tiny filthy house with 8 other people. One of them was this 11 year old boy with Down's who walked around butt naked and was fascinated by everything I did and had. He mumbled incomprehensibly and danced provocatively with the pole on the front porch. Thank God I had a headlamp to stumble my way over the mounds of broken cement block in the front yard. No electricity anywhere. Anyway, I slept like a baby. The next day the ding-dong that I paid to walk around with the megaphone apparently left town without finishing the job, so only 5 women came yesterday.


I get frustrated and disheartened when people do nothing to help themselves as a community. The lack of that spirit here comes in painful pulses, interspersed with inspirational, tireless giving. My friend Peter, with whom I live thinks that all Haitians need to find God, because otherwise they are not good people by nature. Hummmmm. Right now there is a lot of unrest between the borders. Apparently the constitutional tribunal of the DR just finalized a case that strips citizenship from offspring of non'residents, even if they were born here, or their ancestors were born here, trickling all the way down to when their original relatives entered illegally. This brings back ugly images of the time of Trujillo. laws from 1929, when thousands of Haitians or those dark enough to look like one, were slaughtered. There's a great article that Vali just sent me, Aparteid in the Americas. Are you Haitian?. http://www.myriamchancy.com/apartheid-in-the-americas-are-you-haitian/ I understand of course that you can not let rivers of poor, needy, unemployed, illiterate people with their 10 children flow freely across the border and get free services from the DR that suffers from its own poverty. That's why Peter and I have these philosophical conversations about how Haití can help itself become a better place to stay. We and the rest of the international community, my my My camera charge quit before I got to Banane. I hope to send a bunch of photos in my next chapter. Many, many thanks for all the help and interest you have offered. I always tell my women patients that their sisters in the US sent the service. bye bye, Louise