Even now, five months later, there are moments that come to
the forefront of my mind, seemingly at random. Friday on my way to work I was
thinking about the amount of money we spend on Christmas gifts and having an
internal philosophical debate with myself as I stared out the bus window out
onto Lake Washington. And suddenly the image of giving an incredibly
malnourished child a rotting multivitamin jumped into my brain. I couldn’t see
the child in my mind, just my hand handing over the stinky, molded multivitamin
at the Sisters of Charity clinic in Cite Soleil. This clinic isn’t a part of
NPFS/St. Luke, but our organization is friendly with them and so some of our
volunteers go there on weekends to help out. Because we don’t oversee it, there
are old, expired medications and even some that have completely gone bad like
this particular multivitamin.
In the complete, overwhelming chaos that envelopes those families
in the clinic, the volunteers, the clinic as a whole, and the neighborhood, you
have no choice but to accept some incredibly difficult circumstances because
there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it. Is giving a
nutrient-deficient child a rotted multivitamin worse than none at all? It’s a theoretical
debate that you can’t afford to have with yourself because there are 50 other
families standing in line and you’ve only got an hour left of clinic. Maybe
that’s a decision that licensed healthcare providers are trained to make, but
almost no one volunteering at the clinic has any professional training. And for
that matter, how well are you able to apply your training when literally the
only common denominator is the anatomy of the human body? The drugs, bacteria,
viruses, genetics, incidence, diet… every possible environmental factor is
different. I saw a lot of American doctors coming out of that clinic looking every
bit as astounded as I felt. And those
were the doctors who felt ready to jump in to tropical medicine. The experience
of attempting to help in that neighborhood is chaotic on a level of magnitude
that is unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived it firsthand.
Looking back on the experience, what’s even more amazing to
me is that I rode home from our morning of volunteering feeling tired, but
normal. There was no internal war going on, no shock or stress or depression. We
stopped for an errand, got back to the house, ate lunch and showered. Having
lived in Haiti for over six months at this point, I was fully immersed in its
culture. Were these people poorer than the people I was used to working with?
Yes, but not exceptionally. It is an incredible tragedy that there were hundreds
of gravely ill children in clinic that day, but with the resources and ability
to which we had access, we were helping. You had better believe that if we had
multivitamins that weren’t expired we would have been passing those out
instead. In that place, at that moment, we were doing everything we could.
The true tragedy of that experience didn’t hit until I was
far enough removed from the situation to realize that those illnesses, those
deaths in many cases, are due to a lack of will to change the circumstance.
Being in Haiti with an ineffective government, extremely limited international
trade, and almost no big business, I forgot how powerful we are as a society.
We ship millions of tons of products around the world. We regulate billions
upon billions of pharmaceuticals, both in access and quality. We climb
mountains and dive to the depths of the ocean and attempt to conquer every
corner of this Earth. But how is it that we manage to leave these children to
starve to death? To die from easily curable disease? To let them live with
itchy rashes and bloated bellies, spending their days begging on the street?
And how could it possibly be, that just five months later, I
find myself spending hundreds of dollars on Christmas gifts? How could I let
myself get so caught up? It disgusts me, but I guess I know why. It’s because there
is absolutely no way to reconcile that these two lives could possibly be lived
out on the same planet, in consecutive years, by the same person. In order to
live in the US and relate to others and excel at my job, I have to ignore enormous
parts of last year. To sit through a thirty minute discussion of a No-Show
policy, I have to block out what I saw at the hospital in Haiti. Even now, I
can’t let myself go through the string of tragedies I witnessed on a daily
basis to expand on that last sentence. Because now I live here, in the land of
plenty, and the way that we show that we care about each other is to give a
gift at Christmas. Which used to be one of my favorite activities by the way;
picking out and giving gifts to the people I love. So in an attempt to reconcile, to bring us
closer together no matter how minutely, maybe this year we can all give out one
extra gift: a donation to the proverbial child, through any organization of
your choice. Because you’re right, any donation you’re able to give won’t end
poverty. But it might mean that the next child receiving multivitamins gets to have
unexpired ones.
