outside of NPH

Today I got to take a fabulous trip outside of the compound to go see some other hospitals. We went with a director of Zanmi Lasante (Partner's in Health) to the Central Plateau, first for a meeting at Hopital Albert Schweitzer (HAS), then to see the construction of ZL's new hospital in Mirebalais. It took about 2 hours to get to Verrettes, the town HAS is in, then about half way through our trip back home, we stopped by the construction site in Mirebalais. I couldn't put these places on a map, so here's the one I just found on Google images. The Artibonite river runs through the Central Plateau, making water accessible and bringing huge trees, great farming and cholera. The Cholera epidemic is much worse there than in Tabarre (and I assume Port-au-Prince in general) which became evident in our meeting.

The meeting we attended was between ZL which has a Cholera Treatment Center (CTC) in the area and adminstrators for Albert Schweitzer. The meeting was in French (hallelujah- I actually understood everything) and was to discuss the closing of HAS's CTC. Yes, hospitals in Haiti love their acronym's just as much as they do in the US. HAS has completely run out of funding to cover the CTC and confirmed with Haiti's Minstry of Health that they will be closing it down. However, ZL's CTC... wow this is getting way too technical.


Here's the situation: ZL already has patients in their kitchen and staff room to keep up with the amount of cholera patients they are seeing. HAS has about 40 patients a day in their cholera center, but no more money to run it, so all those patients are either going to ZL's kitchen or they won't be treated. Everyone is running out of money and there are still so many sick people.


The meeting was very professional, about 15 of us sitting in HAS's beautiful medical library, speaking in French and trying to balance ethics with logistics about how best to manage the situation. It made me hopeful for what our relatively new organization, St. Luke, can become. But as I'm writing this, another part of me is happy that we just tell it like it is and get things done without the bureaucracy.


Having only been here for two months, I'm torn between feeling frustrated that people are forgetting about Haiti and taking the stance that organizations have to think about the sustainability of their programs. There's emotional and logical reasoning to both sides and when people's lives are on the line it's such an impossible call. How can you be the person that decides that with what little money you have at your disposal, you're going to focus on prevention, when you know that people will die because of it. The Medical Director of HAS, literally has to make that call within the next few weeks.


In lighter news, I started listening to the newest The Script album which is a-mazing! Also I'm going to start writing quotes, because Ivy was reading me exerpts from her quote book a while ago and I was crying I was laughing so hard. So, we'll kick off the quotes with...


HAS Medical Director: "We have 40 beds and 300 people showing up at the door in the morning. What are we supposed to do? It's not like we can just shut the doors."
IK: "You better believe SJ would be there with a padlock."


Me: "Do you speak any spanish?"
JF: "Yes, I can say 'te amo' to a girl... the rest you don't have to speak the language to do it"