Medical clinics

Tonight's blog will be short. It's been a long week and it's late tonight. When we arrived at Doti there were not many people and the pastor had not finished giving out the tickets for today. He had also not given out any for tomorrow. As a result we have rescheduled tomorrow and will go back to Dubreil.

We woke up to low cloudy skies. At 7 am it began raining for about a half hour, enough to stall our departure. We arrived at Dubreil at 9:30. The street was full of people waiting -- over 100. We were set up by 10:00. Only a few of the people waiting were from Platon. Vilia, Amoce's 17 year old sister, came with us to observe today. She's considering a medical career so this was a good chance for her to be involved. Syly, the Haitian nurse, took her under her wing and she pitched right in for the whole long day.

Travel just to the river crossing and set up clinic there before crossing the river. (Matt walked to the river and said it was running knee high but really swift and lotd of big rocks. )

Sixteen of us piled into Robert's pick-up truck for the 15 minute drive to Bambou today. We got set up pretty quickly because we've been there twice before. Witchner's family lives in Bambou.

Yanie saw the doctor this morning.  Her surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning!!  We are praying that everything goes very smoothly.  We'll try to phone Amoce again tomorrow evening and post any news we hear. (It's been raining very heavily for the past two days.  Not good news for the people in the tent cities in Port AuPrince.)

[singlepic id=15 w=320 h=240 float=left]This morning we went over to the Les Cayes soccer field where refugees are being housed in tents. Many of the tents are Boy Scout tents and the Haitian Boy Scouts are there in uniform helping out.

The last time I posted about Yanie Dominique's broken hip we had heard back from Dr. Nelson.  He recognized that she needed a total hip replacement.  He has referred us to another orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Mehne.  We are in contact with him now and will be working toward getting Yanie to the Dominican Republic for surgery in late October.  There are many, many things to arrange if that is going to happen including a passport for her and her translator.  Dr.

Now that we're back, unpacked, and have settled back into a more-or-less regular schedule, it's time to get down to all of the necessary follow-up tasks.  Our first task was to write a letter to the medical director at Cite Lumiere to set up an account so that we can make referrals for the TB and HIV clinic there.  We understand that we are able to write simple hand-written referrals from the field, give the person money to travel by public transport to Cite Lumiere, and they can show up and get free testing for TB and HIV.  If they test positive they will receive the meds they need.  (Greyson

We have returned from Haiti safely, and for the most part, healthy.  Paul and Jan arrived about midnight last Saturday night; the rest of the team (Dr. Don, Dr. Mark, Dr. Matt, Greyson, John Burnett, and John & Lynda DuBois) arrived home about 2 a.m. last Friday morning.  Dr. Don returned with a bit of pneumonia but is recovered pretty well from it; an injection of antibiotics in Haiti helped a lot.

October 23, 2008 We left Northampton at 3:30 a.m. for a smooth ride to JFK arriving there by 7 a.m. without getting caught in rush hour traffic. There are new check-in procedures...electronic kiosks that allow you to swipe your passport and get a boarding pass.  Then you walk your luggage over to small individualized counters to be checked in.  The process is incredibly smooth without long lines to stand in.  We proceeded to our gate with ease.  Once at the gate we had about 3 hours to wait for our plane.