A Quest for Haiti: Reflections on a Year in Haiti: A Long and Bumpy Road...

Last week, there was a group of doctors here from a program called Centura Health. This group does a lot, but specifically in developing countries, they send volunteers to faith-based hospitals. They work with these hospitals to improve efficiency, provide training, education and different kinds of health programs. They worked in Alma Mater Hospital in Gros Morne for a week and one of the things that they wanted to do while they were here was to see a more rural village clinic. I think they had some business to do there, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. We were invited to go along to see the clinic, and also to see more of the area.

So, on Wednesday, we got into our truck and headed out for Pendeus or Pondi in Creole. We made a pit stop at the hospital in Gros Morne to pick up the others and we got to see the pediatrics unit. We saw a baby girl that had a respiratory infection or some type of respirataotry problem. This was the first time that we had seen the hospital. This hospital here is relatively large and well equipped, but more difficult cases are sent to a state hospital a little ways away or some cases may end up in Port-au-Prince. For example, there is a little girl here who has a large growth or tumor on one of her elbows. She was sent to the children's hospital in PAP and may potentially have surgery to amputate her arm. Right now, the mother wants the surgery but the father doesn't want to. If the girl has the surgery and dies, than it is the mother's fault and the father will stop supporting her. If she doesn't have the surgery and dies anyway, then they have learned a lesson and can have another child. Apparently this is a common belief when it comes to making medical decisions.

The clinic that we were traveling to was about an hour and a half away on some of the bumpiest roads I have ever been on. It isn't really possible for me to describe the condition of the road, other than the fact that there were occasional small boulders in the middle of the road that had to be driven over, large parts of the road were washed away, and we had to make several river crossings. It was a beautiful drive but by the time we got there we were all a little queazy and I was surprised we weren't suffering from whiplash given how much we were jostled around.

When we got there, we got a tour of the clinic from Madanm Marcel who is the only one who works there. She is a certified nurse and there is no doctor that is there regularly. I don't have any pictures, but it was a concrete buildings with a large waiting room, a consulting room, a storeroom for all the drugs, a room where all the records were kept, a bathroom and another room that had space for medical procedures including the birth of a baby. It was pretty simple, but it really had everything one would need to work on common health problems. If someone was really ill, then they would be sent to the hospital in Gros Morne or elsewhere. One of the woman from Centura wanted to know what kinds of resources Madanm Marcel had for listening or seeing fetuses. She showed us the doppler listening device that she had. There happened to be a pregnant woman there who was waiting to been seen and we got to hear her baby's heartbeat!

It has been very interesting to learn more about medicine in Haiti as well as see the kind of resources people have access to. I mentioned before that I don't have any photos of the hospital or the clinic, but I do have some of the roads on the way there.