Friday, January 29, 2010

We have turned to some other phase at l’Hopital de la Communauté Haitienne. The flow of patient has not stopped but is different. We still receive people all day, some of them have been walking on fractures for two weeks, but for the most part the major open fractures…, and head injuries are not coming in. The word has gotten out though that the hospital has a lot of foreign volunteer doctors seeing patients for free. For that we have two outdoor clinics screening people and sending them inside only if they are serious.

There is a French group and an American group outdoors. Indoors we have many American medical staff, some Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Jamaicans, a very special group for the US Virgin Islands, and Haitian Diaspora folks. The hospital’s permanent staff is also trying to figure out how to transition to “normal.” At some point we had 200 foreign volunteers and about 100 Haitian volunteers. The hospital staff is 200. Yesterday there were 2 major accidents that brought people for emergencies, one was a motorcycle versus a pedestrian, and the other was a landslide in the Laboule sand mines. Two brothers were brought in from having been pulled out from under the sand. A third brother brought them in and said he didn’t think he could take this because he had just had buried his wife from the earthquake. I did not see these patients, John saw them; one was in the ICU in critical condition.

John arrived Tuesday night with Dr. John Moses and Dr. Peter Moses, and he has been a translator in the ICU for the last two days. I took most of today off from the hospital. I had been spending all of my days there since the day after the Earthquake. I was constantly running around solving minor things for people. I was taking questions and request from both Haitians and non-Haitians, and finding people as that were needed or finding things like: Do you know where I could find clean scrubs? Batteries? Trash bags? Blood? Someone to distribute water? Have you seen my son named Peterson? I haven’t seen him since the earthquake and I heard he was in a hospital with an amputated leg. Peterson was not at HCH. I also did some delicate translations, like having to tell people that their parent was not going to pull through. It’s been busy with very little time to think about it. Yesterday I got upset. I did not get upset by the situation of the pain and suffering. I got upset about human relations. For the last week, leaders of foreign volunteer teams have been meeting with the Hospital’s permanent leadership to talk about how things were going, strategies, systems, etc… All along there were issues of what the permanent staff of the hospital should be doing.

There were communication issues as the Haitian nurses don’t speak English and the Hospital became an English-speaking place. Anyhow, for the last few days, there was an issue of having too many young adults, mostly males having signed up to volunteer as translators and transporters, and some of them were being thought of as imposters. We agreed that the hospital was simply too crowded by patient relatives and volunteers. For quite a while now we’ve been trying to enforce a policy of one relative at a time per patient. We tried to decide how many volunteer translators and transporters were actually needed. Two days ago, I tried to weed out volunteers by telling everyone that to come back the next day they needed to ask someone to come to tell me that they were useful and wanted. It turned out that just about everyone found someone to recommend them. Yesterday the job of deciding who the volunteers would be was taken over by an American security specialist. It got to a point that his method of weeding out was offensive to me. Around mid-morning I left for the day. Tomorrow morning, I will go to the strategy meeting and try to discuss human relations and Haitian respect. Many lives have been saved thanks financial, service, and in-kind donations from all over the world. There are now longer -erm issues to think about. For example the doctors would like to discharge my 16 year-old amputee friend Ricky. His grandmother says that if he is discharged she has to take him to Port-de-Paix because the family no longer has a place in the Port-au-Prince area. Getting to Port-de-Paix is a very uncomfortable dusty trip for anyone. How will he get a prosthesis if he goes far away? The Swedish group said that they may be able to bring trainers to teach Haitians how to make prostheses. How will we find Ricky then? Many lives have been cut short or changed by this earthquake. Miraculously most houses in our neighborhood are in good shape. People are going about their daily pre-earthquake activities as much as possible. Of all my siblings, I am the only one regularly hanging out at the hospital now. All the teenagers in my extended family are being sent to relatives in the US and Canada so that they can finish the school year. Right now only Jessica (11 yo) and Anais (13 y)) have no plans for travel. In the hospital yard large groups of children are roaming around looking for something to do. Sometimes they play catch with a blown up hospital glove.