Friday: Parts 1 & 2

Friday

This will probably be one of the more memorable days of my Haitian adventure, and probably my life.  There were really three parts to the day, and each one was totally different than the last.  Two were pretty great experiences, but unfortunately, the first part was one of the most upsetting things I’ve witnessed. 

Part 1: A Fourteen Year Old’s Eye

As we were eating breakfast, Liz told Dr. Abbey that there was a girl from one of the villages who had walked up to Matana by herself this morning, and she had apparently been punched in her face and her eye looked pretty bad.  Abbey went over and took a look, and when she came back I heard the full story.  Her father had been fighting with her and beating her up two nights ago, and at some point started poking her in the eye with a stick.  Apparently, her mother had tried to put some aloe vera inside her eye yesterday, but she walked up here this morning because she was starting to loss her vision out of the affected eye. Unable to do anything in or clinic, we asked Geelynn, one of our Community Health Workers who lives at the mission to accompany her to the hospital in Debuk.  She complied.  At that point, I hadn’t even seen the girl, because I didn’t want to jump up and go see her just because I’d heard that awful story.  I was outside talking with Abbey when she and Geelynn returned from the hospital. The doctor hadn’t even looked at her eye, he had just given her a prescription for antibiotic eye drops, and told her to come back in one week.  Abbey was outraged and finally got the doctor on the phone and he agreed to see her again on Monday.  Because we are not an operational clinic facility during the times when the medicals teams are down here, we only have access to a very limited supply of medicine, and Abbey has actually already given away most of her own personal supply of Ibuprofen.  Luckily I remembered that I had a full bottle Tylenol with me, so we did send her home with 35 or so Tylenols for her headache, and gave her a cliff bar and glass of water before she left.  As deeply sad as it was to just look at her, this skinny but beautiful 14 year old, holding some ice in a rag over her tortured eye, and know the story behind it—the truly heartbreaking moments were when we had to watch her walk away, out the gates of Matana, and back to her house…with her father.

Part 2: Ian’s Group—Team Tassy

On Thursday we started getting emails from one of the doctors Chris and Abbey knows, who wanted to link us up with another American in Haiti right now, Ian Rosenberger.  It turns out he is a founder of this company “Thread” which helps Haitians make money from collecting plastic trash, and then processes and recycles the plastic from Haiti and sells it to American companies to be processed into textiles.  The girls and I are currently SUPER excited about the idea of opening a “branch” (so-to-speak) here in Arcahaie.  Anyway, another little interesting fact about Ian is that he was on Survivor, the TV show some years ago. 

He showed up to Matana in a nice rental pick-up truck with about 6 other people who were down here with him for a long weekend.  Most of them have been friends for close to 10 years, and had met while in undergrad at Penn State.  They told us about their Team Tassy project in Cite Soliel, which is a foundation that “identifies, saves, and then mentors through adulthood dying Haitian children whose access to life-saving medical procedures has been cut off due to poverty, the earthquake, or both.”  They were interested in seeing and learning about what we were doing and seeing if a partnership could be formed (which definitely can and hopefully will).  We then left with them to drive to the surgery center a few miles away in Arcahaie, which neither Abbey, Liz, or myself had seen yet.  Then as we were about to drive back he suggested we all get lunch together, so we went to a nice place along the coast, and I had my first Haitian seafood of the trip (it was delicious).  It was also a great lunch for me because several of the girls on the team had their MPHs, and overall, it was just a fascinating exchange of ideas with really smart, kind, and enthusiastic people, who had great ideas for improving the situation here in Haiti. We did get some group shots, but they are on Team Tassy cameras, so I’ll post those once we get them.  Below just shows where this lunch was.

After gorging ourselves at lunch, we told Ian he could just drop us off at Route one and our Matana road so we could walk the 1.5 miles back up to the Mission.  After about a mile of walking (drenched, and I mean Bikram Yoga drenched in sweat), a mother holding her infant ran over to us smiling and waving.  She showed us his hernia scar, which still had stiches in it…  And, she motioned towards the Mission, letting us know that the CHI surgical team which was here in January had performed the surgery.  She also showed us his extremely swollen testicle… so it’s actually on our list today to hike back down the road with suture removing supplies and take a look at the infant more closely. 

I don’t have too many relevant pictures for these two parts of Friday, so the first photo is of the mountain side behind the Mission, and then the second is of Liz one night when we were walking home from our neighborhood “coke (as in the cola) lady.”