Hello friends and fellow wanderers, you will have to read the entire blog before you get to the mystery for which this entry is named. Ja-ja, the Haitians are teaching me some crafty tricks!
The finish of week three on the set; the thunder just rolled off the mountains down to the Pedernales seashore with such a resounding KABAMM that it set off a few car alarms down the road. Probably the Red Cross vehicles whose drivers are loading up on beer and pollo frito at the restaurant a block away. Rainy season is full on and it took us all week to get smart enough to make it to the beach on time after work before the customary 3 hours of persistent afternoon rain. Everyone is thrilled despite the flooding and veneer of green is beginning to drape itself over the landscape of cactus and rubble. The air is 10 degrees cooler.
The three ring clinical circus I brought to Sant Santè Anse-a-Pitres has packed up and headed out - I'm super pleased with how the trainings have gone, and relieved that they are over. I began last week with the didactic part of cervical screening, followed by 4 days of practical application. The nurses were engaged and are on their way to becoming proficient. Jeanne will supervise them in continued learning in my absence.
The Speculators
The biggest feature was the captivating performance of Dr Mary Gratch, who dedicated a week's precious vacation, away from St Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, to teach the docs and nurses here how to use the ultrasound machine that has been collecting a generous layer of red dust since it arrived here 3 years ago. No one had any clue how to use it. The word spread fast and the clinic has been packed with big bellied women for the last 4 days. Mary taught staff how to judge dates, head and placental position, moms could see the little baby's heart beating, with directions ricochetting around a hot, crammed room in three languages. She is a rockstar!! This can give the providers and families here a chance to do advance planning for perinatal emergencies like breach, placenta previa, fetal non-viability, etc. Just as a note, the first two births I saw here before Mary came produced dead babies, for a variety of reasons, most being total lack of prenatal care.
Dok Mary doin her thing
Using old UN trailer and my battery-powered projector for training
The UN Peacekeepers who were living next door to the clinic since the expulsion of Aristide in 2004 moved out about a year ago, so the land and the existing buildings have been lent to the clinic for the meantime. Problem is, there is no power there so the resident handymen have had to jerry rig a series of generators, solar invertors, twisting bare wires into ridiculous contortions and risking electrocution and the destruction of the fragile sonography unit. The machine is way tougher than we thought however, and behaved miraculously. None of this drama was prepared for before Mary and dozens of large women were waiting as 9:00, 10:00, 10:30 drifted by. Mary was a supa-troopa, Gras a bondye.
There's a little Haitian proverb that might be apt for anyone coming to volunteer here: Si ou renmen grenn anndan, ou dwe renmen po a tou. "If you want the nut, you better like the shell too."
Using old UN trailer and my battery-powered projector for training
When the UN packed up, they took the Virgin with them - they kept the nut and left the shell
The Hispañola Health Partners team is meeting today in Pedernales to travel to Jacmel where we will further strengthen the collaboration with the Haitian Ministry of Health for our community health center in the mountain region of Marjofre. Many of you have generously donated to this cause, thank-you, thank-you. Along with the details of how this goes, my next chapter from deep inside Haiti will include a little more about the ethnobiology of witchcraft and various tetrodotoxins found here.
This is highly toxic datura which grows up in the hills, the base for atropine and scopolamine
bye for now, Louise
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