Time to catch up on the last few days!
So Sunday, after I posted my last blog, we heard a marching
band going down the street by our compound, and realized it was two soccer
teams making their way to the nearby soccer stadium – it was a match between
the local high school team and the alumni.
Tons of people from the town filed into the walled-in dirt field to
watch the game. We all had to pay $1 each (the foreigner price, surely) to
watch the game, but of course by bringing out my wallet, I suddenly get a swarm
of kids asking me for money. The
most persistent will stay by you for a half hour, telling you that they need $1
to go to school. It puts you in a weird
position to have to say no over and over again.
Even though a dollar isn’t much, there are not enough dollars for all of
the children in town, and since we’re new to town, we would expect to see
children everyday if we started to hand out money.
We are still waiting for the ethics review board to approve
our field research before we start, but in the meantime, we went to a couple villages on Monday
to explore the health posts there and see what the areas look like. Every night this week, we have also been
having evening lectures, outdoor on the porch, with this week’s visiting
doctor/supervisor or the Tufts group, learning about different tropical
diseases in this area.
Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Shelley and I have been
hanging out at the nutrition center at the hospital here, where malnourished children
arrive, sometimes with their mothers, to get breakfast and lunch, and otherwise
play with toys all morning or take naps, similar to a daycare center. We'll likely be hanging out here at least twice a week to observe and help out when we can. Carrying around and playing with babies and
toddlers – that’s right in my wheelhouse.
Using my French, I’ve also been able to chat a lot with the ladies who
operate the Nutrition Center, figuring out their routines and multiple needs to better
run the center and help the children recover.
The mothers come sometimes from very far away, on foot, in the heat, to
come to the center and get meals for their children – sometimes the only meals
that they will get that day. One simple
fix that I noticed right away was the lack of soap in the center; posters were
up regarding the importance of washing hands with soap and water, yet there was
no soap so the mothers and children were just rinsing their hands in the sink
before eating (and we’ve seen these kids crawling on the floor, swishing around
puddles of pee, and touching all kinds of unclean things). One of the other American visitors to the
compound luckily gave us a box of hotel soap that he had been collecting to
donate, and we were able to bring that over.
We noticed after the first day, with 2-year-olds drooling
and coughing all over us, that we need to start wearing scrubs – which are
provided for all volunteers here to use in the hospital. Sure enough, while wearing scrubs, Shelley
got peed on by a baby yesterday. The
children rarely wear diapers here (too expensive, and not typical in this
area), so the babies and toddlers wear maybe just underwear, or sometimes don’t
wear any bottoms at all in the nutrition center. So I’m sure I’ll get my first pee soiling one
of these days – just a matter of time!
I went from carrying around a severely wasted child
yesterday falling asleep in my arms, to going to a luxurious beach resort
today. Talk about switching between
totally different dimensions. I guess that it can't hurt to promote Haiti's tourist economy. Today the
nutrition center and many non-emergency services were closed for “Fête de Dieu”
(God’s Day, or Corpus Christi I believe), so we all rented a tap-tap (a pick-up
truck with benches in the bed that can carry an unreasonable amount of people)
for the day and made our way to a beach resort close to Cap Haitien via a
hour-long bumpy ride through hilly dirt roads.
This resort was pretty amazing – it took us all a little while to adjust
to its luxury. There was a big, lovely
restaurant with a bar, and a super clean and beautiful beach where we could lay
on beach chairs. The northern coast is
just stunning, with green hills cascading down towards the sea, and the water
is so clear, sparkling, and calm – I could just sit in the water all day. The restaurant and bar charge US prices, so
it was not cheap, but I took advantage of the opportunity to get myself a
bloody mary and some grilled local conch!
We all got pretty roasted under the intense sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to shield us
from the 95* heat. Still, we all look
like pink and bronze gods.
Despite sleeping under a mosquito net in my tiny bed (which
feels like sleeping on a wobble board – I think the frame is on its last legs)
and dousing myself with backwoods deet, I am still getting pretty heavily lit
up by mosquito bites. To be expected –
it seems to happen anywhere I go, and I better get used to it for the next 8
weeks!
We’ve been spending all of our nights on the porch working
on our laptops after lectures, feverishly trying to complete seemingly
never-ending IRB revisions and papers.
It seems like some reprieve is in sight though, and a day at the beach
today was definitely an amazing treat.
We might actually finally have our outdoor movie night for the first
time tonight that we’ve been planning for days!
:)
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