Pig on a leash

We’re now just past 2 weeks in to our time in Haiti!

We are still waiting for final approval from the IRB back home to begin our surveys in the community, but we have still gone into the villages twice this week to meet the people who work at the health posts and walk around to collect water samples from wells and other water sources for testing.  The guys were giving out smiley face stickers which was super exciting for kids in the neighborhoods and really drew a crowd.  In between days in the community, we’ve been continuing to visit the nutrition center in the mornings.  I absolutely love playing with the children, but everyday gets a little more disheartening – it’s hard to feel like we can make a great difference when the largest problems I see are that children are unnecessarily ill because their parents cannot afford their medicines, and are hungry because there is no food to eat at home.  There is one child who is severely malnourished and so very sick – he stares around the room blankly with big eyes, his head seems as big as his body, and he weighs only 15 pounds at a year old.  He needs to be eating special therapeutic food, which he receives (though in insufficient quantity because he was prescribed less than half of the amount that he actually needs), but it’s hard to tell whether he is eating it all  - especially since both his parents are unemployed (apparently there is little work here) and are hungry themselves.  His mother is also pregnant.  Yesterday, he refused to eat and then threw up all his food from the previous day, so I said that he had to go to the hospital.  It doesn’t seem that there is an inpatient therapeutic feeding center, so he was sent back to the nutrition center with a short list of medications to buy, which his parents likely cannot afford.  One of them was oral rehydration salts, which we were able to bring him later because one of the other students brought some to give away.  But I’m really concerned and will watch him very closely in the coming days. 

We’ve continued to have our nightly lectures with the visiting doctors.  Some medical information is way over my head, but I enjoy the discussions.  Last night, we had a discussion about the ethical dilemmas that we face every day in health care in developing countries.  So many people every day have treatable illnesses that are fatal if they cannot pay the $100, $20, or $5 to get the medications they need.  One boy who visits our compound – an orphan of the storms from a few years ago – was bitten by a dog a few weeks ago.  He is completely fine and playful now, but rabies symptoms can take up to a few months to appear and by the time they do, there is absolutely no treatment – it is 100% fatal.  However, the rabies vaccine is rarely available and if it can be sent over from the US, it costs almost $1,000 (which would lead me to the enormous issue of the completely absurd price of life-saving drugs – but that is a much longer conversation).  So what do we do – us foreigners here who can afford to forego $50 to save a life?  Or if we had more, do we put $1,000 towards saving the life of one boy, or put it towards saving 50 lives with antibiotics?  Or put it towards food packages for the children at the nutrition center, if we were forced to choose?  Sure enough, other residents staying here from Port-au-Prince asked us last night right after this lecture (and on their 3^rd day at this hospital) to donate to a cash collection for a patient at the hospital who needs antibiotics to recover from a terrible illness but cannot afford them.  The medical students also know that the woman in the bed right next to this patient is also suffering from a fatal illness and also cannot pay for antibiotics.  And likely several other patients in the hospital are in the same position, and more will come every day.  The hospital has a policy that we are not to provide any cash to patients to purchase their medicines, because while us visitors will leave in a couple months, a couple weeks, or tomorrow, the rest of the hospital must face the precedent that we have laid and that they cannot sustain for every needy patient that comes after us.  It’s these dilemmas between personal and institutional choices that make work in developing countries very difficult, and often depressing.

To end this entry on a lighter note:

1. We had our first torrential downpour on Tuesday!  It hadn’t rained since we arrived, and the rain miraculously brought the temperature way down (to maybe a brisk 80 degrees or so!) so that I actually wore pants and a jacket, and put a sheet over me while I slept for the first time! 
2. We did communal girls laundry last week, and today I realized that I couldn’t find a shirt I had washed.  We know we emptied the dryer completely, so it was very puzzling and I asked the others this morning if they had seen it.  A little while later, lo and behold, I saw one of the cleaning ladies here wearing my blue button shirt – or an identical shirt.  After spying on her all morning, I awkwardly confronted her (I normally might not confront her, but I packed so light I really need those clothes for the next 7 weeks! She can have them when I go!) in my broken Creole, and then I couldn’t understand her response but figured it was something like – no, someone gave this to me, or something like that.  So I gave up.  But alas, we thought it was funny.
3. In the village on Tuesday, I saw someone walking a pig on a leash!

You have to enjoy the little things :)