by
Website Editor
| May 07, 2010
Clinic today was near the beach in Ka Janvye. As with most villages, the only “large” building was a church with a tin roof and plastic tarp sides donated by one of the NGOs or governments helping Haiti. We were able to tie up the tarps to the roof to allow some breeze through. That made the heat almost bearable inside.
On most clinic days people who come in with a “fever” rarely raise the temperature on a thermometer to normal (despite feeling very warm to the touch. But people in Ka Janvye were really running fevers today and the doctors found several cases of malaria. I guess the rainy season and the resultant surge in the mosquito population is taking its toll.
After seeing over 150 patients, we closed the clinic up and took a walk to the beach. A bunch of children joined us at the beach. Like all kids in Haiti they LOVE having their pictures taken with digital cameras and then seeing themselves on the view finder. Down the beach there were several men in a ship building yard making the raw skeletons of 35-40 foot boats out of the sawed off logs of palm trees. I’m sure that’s how it’s been done for generations.
After we got home, Fred and I and interpreter, Max, went down to take a four-legged cane and some medicines to people in his village. We had forgotten to take canes with us yesterday and did not have the medicines the doctors wanted to prescribe for two boys in one family. So we made house calls, walking behind Max on narrow paths through neighborhoods with the kids screaming in glee “Blanche, Blanche” which is Haitian for “white, white” at the unusual occurrence.
Max, wife and new born daughter
Fred stopped to make a house call on a new born baby that that he proclaimed in good health. We stopped to meet Max’s family and also check on his newborn baby daughter, also a chubby, healthy little tyke
We ended up at a proposed clinic site under some mango trees across a stream from an earthquake ravaged Voodoo Temple. Max said we could borrow tables and chairs from the wrecked temple, but could not hold the clinic at the temple as the locals wouldn’t come into the site.
Just after going to bed, I heard the first sounds of an earthquake. We’ve been through many now in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Haiti. But this was the first time I heard the moans and groans of faults rubbing together that other people have described to me. The quake itself was small and could only have lasted for a few seconds. It was the sound that was eerie.