Island Time

Where everything moves a little slower and being ‘on time’ is a very flexible term…

So to recap the past week…

It was very interesting to visit Children of the Promise, an orphanage/infant care center 20 minutes from here, although our timing was completely off – all of the babies were taking a nap!  We’ll have to go back some time to have plenty of baby fun time.

Besides a visit to the village on Thursday morning, where Shelley and I talked to families in the community about their perceptions of malnutrition, I spent the weekdays in Milot, going to the Nutrition Center, and mostly trying to figure out how to help little Jamesley.  I’ve been enlisting the help of different visiting doctors to figure out how to treat this little boy – going back and forth between the lab and clinic and nutrition center to run different tests and figure out what treatment he needs.  To complicate things, apparently his mother did have her new baby a few weeks ago, and his parents dropped Jamesley off at his grandparents’ home because they could no longer take care of a sick child and a new baby.  The grandparents themselves have tiny children of their own, and both do not work – the grandfather has been out of work for a few years since he went blind.  On Friday, the docs that I had been working with decided to put Jamesley on a regimen of deworming/antibacterial medication to get rid of any parasites in his body that may be contributing to his malnutrition.  The grandparents let us know where they live (just down the street) and preferred that we come by to give Jamesley the medication, so since Friday evening I’ve been going by their house three times a day to check in on Jamesley and give him his medicine.  The grandparents are incredibly humble and welcoming, but they too have very little food for their own children, let alone Jamesley.  To make matters worse, the father came by over the weekend and took a day’s worth of his PlumpyNut (therapeutic food) and left with it while the grandmother wasn’t home and unbeknownst to his blind father. This is not only dangerous for Jamesley, but if it was taken for the new baby, it is very dangerous for the baby as well since this product is not for babies that young.  I’ve been bringing by mashed banana and biscuits (plus bananas and biscuits for the other children to hopefully ensure that Jamesley gets his share to himself), but I am quite sure he is not getting the amount of food that he needs… It looks like the parasites might be clearing up, but he still refuses to eat anytime I’ve observed him (medicine can disrupt the appetite as well) and there clearly isn’t much food for them at home.

No beach or getaway this weekend, but I did take one field trip – Shelley, Nadia, and I went to go meet people who work with SOIL – a very cool organization in Haiti that has been constructing composting toilets for household, communal, or public use here.  I had looked up their work before since I heard about it in class.  Sanitation and waste management is largely non-existent in Haiti, with trash or burning trash everywhere and rivers of sewage, so natural innovations such as waste compost could make a great difference here.  Saturday morning, the three of us went on what we thought would be a half-hour walk to an intersection to meet up with the SOIL folks but is more like a 12-kilometer walk – so thankfully they picked us up along the way before we passed out in the heat.  They took us to see their farm where they process the compost and have developed a nursery, planted different crops for sale, and experimented with different natural fertilizers (corn without compost, corn with pee vs. corn with pee + poo!).  We also got to check out their new compost storage location and then run a few errands with them here and there, which included a nice little conch stew lunch at a tiny restaurant in a nearby town.  We got dropped off at the same intersection on the way back and while trying to hail a tap-tap to take us back to the hospital, we got a ride with a rice truck for part of the way, and then as we started on the last few kilometers in the scorching heat, we again luckily got picked up by one of the doctors for the rest of the way.  We were not made for long walks in this heat!

I couldn’t sleep for hours on Saturday night trying to figure out how to help Jamesley recover without creating enormous costs for his family or crossing the boundaries of my role here.  I would take care of him 24/7 myself if that wouldn’t cause a mess of other ethical problems.  He seemed a tiny, tiny bit better this morning when we came by to give him his dose of meds, and I’ve been communicating since Friday with the fine people at Children of the Promise to see if it would be a good idea to have him go to their care center for a few weeks until he recovers, so he can get the food and monitoring that he needs in an appropriate setting.  They came by Milot today to meet the family at their home, evaluate Jamesley’s condition, and explain their services.  When I came by the house to give Jamesley’s his noontime medication, they were just coming back from a stop at the hospital in their car to pick up Jamesley and actually his 19-month-old aunt, who is also showing signs of malnutrition.  They will take care of Jamesley for 3 months to get him back on his feet… sigh of relief.  I held myself together as I watched them drive away.