The Team Departs

Up at 4:30 AM the team began taking down their mosquito nets, collecting all the dirty linen, before grabbing a quick cup of coffee and hard-boiled egg. The bus was at the front door at 5:30 and everyone was ready to go. Last night we had a great celebration with the combined Haitian and American teams. Clorene cooked a great meal of rice, beans, chicken, and super piklise for 20 of us. We presented nice gold-edged Certificates to everyone with a little teasing and roasting thrown in. We even included Mustard Seed's first ever intern, Vilia Amazan, Amoce's 17 year old sister who is thinking about a medical career. We had a substitute driver, Moise, and a substitute translator, Johny. Amoce had bought two beautiful cakes and we had enough cold Prestige to make it very festive! The crowning certificate went to Eli and Clorene for being such great hosts all week. Afterwards Johny spoke to me privately that he had never worked for such a nice organization. While all of our medical clinics were happening, we were simultaneously arranging for the next attempt for Yanie's hip replacement surgery in the DR. We managed to get in touch with the surgeon by phone on Sunday morning. Mark was able to talk to him, doctor-to-doctor, which took a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. In the meantime we phoned the hospital administrator in Santo Domingo to set up housing, then yesterday arranged for plane tickets for Amoce and Yanie. Today Yanie and Amoce travelled to Port on the bus with the team so that they could get their visas to the DR. The plan is that Paul and I and Amoce and Yanie will travel back to Port together on Sunday. There we'll part ways while they go to the DR and we fly home. We had a bad, very windy rainstorm early this afternoon. If this is what the people in the tent cities are going through then it must be pretty awful. It's been raining off and on all day now. Amoce phoned and said it's raining in Port. I hope they can get home tonight. Carrefour flooded earlier this week and it's a real bottleneck. It's also not a real safe place.