Port au Prince Bel Aire Clinic

Life in Haiti is awful. And yet, not so very bad. It's hard to explain. I oscillate from finding it delightful, to then remembering my surroundings, seeing the waist-high piles of trash lining the streets with pigs, dogs, goats rooting through them-right nextdoor to where someone is selling food or sitting in a doorway.

 Or smell the sewage as the more frequent showers loosen things up. Or hear the rain outside and know that thousands of people I see each day are steeping in polluted mud puddles in crowded tent cities.

                              the lunch ladies

You can actually easily forget these things as you walk through the streets. Really. The visuals fade away into the background as you become desensitized after so much shocking sensory overload, and then, another thing happens: You get pulled into the life that is going on, the hustle and bustle, the women doing laundry, carrying baskets of goods on their heads, the men yelling and joking backand forth across the street, carrying long metal pipes and pieces of lumber to and fro. The kids playing, the food cooking, the guy getting his haircut on the side of the road under a gas station awning. The endless stands of electronics and household equipment for sale under brightly colored umbrellas.

Today at lunch break, I walked with Marc, a translator from clinic, down the street into the neighborhood. He pointed out buildings and told me what they used to be, who worked in them, and what was going on now. We bought lunch from giant boiling silver pots run by hard working ladies. We got cokes at what's left of a local pharmacy, where he sold them from a small BBQ cooler, and where on the shelves inside were scattered boxes of Pepcid, a few pain killers, and some prescription bottles with random people's names on them, all in various stages of disintegration.
the pharmacist

Then across the street to what was another pharmacy, now converted into a movie house. We went inside, and there were about 15 people in little straw and wood chairs all turned to the front of the room where a pirated DVD copy of the US movie 'Legion' was playing on a regular TV set on rollers, like the kind they'd put on in front of an elementary school classroom to watch documentaries or shows about hygiene.

                                the movie house

It's weird, and difficult to reconcile the pleasures of the goings on around with the utter wreckage of the environment in which it is taking place.

In clinic, we saw some interesting things. People with masses on their faces and necks that had been there for years, people with contractures after not having their broken joints properly managed over the last 2 months, people with all manner of rashes and itchy parts. Similar to what we saw in Leogane, people are all still having trouble sleeping, anxiety, palpitations, nightmares, cough, watery eyes, stomach aches and bladder infections. And lots of STDs. By comparison to where I'd been working in Leogane, it was a slick and well-staffed location. For one thing, it was in a building, period. We even have little dividers creating semi-private spaces in which each provider saw their own patients, and about 7 guys manning crowd control/patient flow, with a translator for every provider there. Wow! But no sunshine, little light at all actually, and incredible noise from the street below. Difficult in its own way.

We got out a little early and rode back to the compound as it began to rain. We sitting in the back of the truck got wet, but it felt nice in this heat. At the house, we met a slew of new docs and nurses who arrived today, one of whom-Jeff Alpert, MD- I knew from my last trip here. It was great to see him and know that he will be leading the next team to Leogane tomorrow. He will get a lot done there as he knows it and loves it already. The other doctors and nurses are lovely and I think they will be great additions to the teams.


Got wrapped up in lots of admin/business tonight, but in the end I think it was useful. What a job it must be to organize a entire operation like this. Our man here now, Steve Hower, is working his butt off constantly. It's kind of a thankless job, but I hope he knows how much he is appreciated.

Well, bed sounds good right about now.
Tomorrow we will see what the rain has washed up around town...

-J