Kendy

Every morning Mita waits under a tree for me to bring bottles of formula for her to carry back to her house and baby brother, Kendy. Her mom has 7 children and 'shares' a man with another woman so the result is that neither of the man's families are adequately cared for and the mom isn't sufficiently nourished to provide milk for her baby. This is their home, a single-room dwelling with the bed in the back partitioned off with a hanging sheet. In the middle of the house is a circle of rocks, used to hold a cooking pot off the ground over a fire. The baby sleeps in the bed with his mom, the rest of the children sleep on the ground.Several weeks ago, when Kendy was about two weeks old, his mother first brought him to us and told us about her inability to feed him. The baby had been subsiding on sugar water and was pretty pathetic looking. Over the last few weeks he has grown wonderfully and looks to be a healthy, happy baby. When we leave, we'll hire someone to be in charge of preparing the bottles, as the mom's not able to clean the bottles and prepare the formula in a manner clean enough for a newborn.

Hurdles

This week has been a roller-coaster of emotions, emails, phone calls and prayers for us here. Dinel, the mission's assistant director, spent the week in Port au Prince with baby Steven and Steven's mom Janice working on getting a medical visa for Steven. In their past experience getting people to the States, the Bustins have never had this much trouble getting the medical visa. The first appointment with the embassy was on Tuesday and we were denied until we could get more specific letters from both the hospital in the States where Steven will have his surgery, and a hospital in Haiti stating that the surgery cannot be done in Haiti. After a day spent trying to find a working fax machine in Port au Prince, another day waiting while our American embassy was closed to celebrate a Catholic/Voodoo holiday celebrating God's birthday, and Friday being spent fulfilling new requirements the embassy presented to us (once our people in Haiti and the States scrambled quickly to fulfill one requirement and Dinel returns for another interview, the embassy would prevent us with a new requirement that we could have finished long ago if the embassy would have told us about it earlier), we are still without a medical visa. It's amazing the way the embassy has been picking this to pieces. Our latest requirement is a notarized letter from the surgeon who has volunteered to do Steven's surgery. We will not likely get this letter before Wednesday, so at that time I'll head to Port with Dinel, Janice and Steven and go with them to the embassy. It might take a few days to finish up with the embassy and working with the Haitian IBESR to get a paper allowing Steven to leave the country but hopefully I'll be able to take him out by next weekend and get him safely to the States. Thanks for your continued prayers!

This sweet little girl came to the mission a couple days ago. She's one and a half years old and her mom brought her here because she can no longer take care of her so she would like us to put her into an orphanage. The mom is only two years older than I am, she has 5 children and her husband recently left her. With no job and no means of support she is wanting to give away her youngest child before things get worse. A small part of me can understand doing what you have to do to make sure your family is taken care of, even if that means making a huge sacrifice, although I can't imagine anything more devastating than giving up a child. I suppose part of where I still have trouble understanding the culture here is how the mom was smiling and acting very matter-of-fact about the situation. The little girl was singing and playing, clearly happy and well cared for. The mom was affectionate with her and I didn't see any signs of sadness or deeper emotion. I wonder if this is an example of Haitian stoicism or she really was as ok with the idea of giving up her child as she seemed.

Visitors from Ohio

This week we had the blessing of a visit from a team from Grace Church in Akron, Ohio. Eleven guys arrived on Tuesday night and practically didn't stop working until they left this afternoon to head back to Cayes. We had two docs on the team so some of us we ran a three-day- clinic while others worked on numerous things around the mission from building school desks to repairing water pumps and generators. I wasn't great about taking pictures while the team was here, so thanks RaeLeen for most of these pictures! I'm slightly in awe of people who can do handy-work because I'm completely lost with that kind of thing. The kids had a blast playing in the wood shavings from the boards the guys planed. During the clinic, the doctors saw many patients who came in with anything from skin infections to mental illnesses and everything in between. It was wonderful not to be the one doing the diagnostics! I stayed busy doing pharmacy, interpreting (with Jacqueline's help; the people would say what they have to say, Jacqueline tells me in more simplified Creole, then I'd tell the doctor in English. It took awhile but it worked), doing wound care and whatever else needed to be done.This lady was in a car accident nearly three months ago that killed two of her children and left her with significant abdominal wounds. I've been doing daily dressing changes for about a month and a half with her.My first IV-start in Haiti. After two months I was worried I'd lost the skill. This boy ended up getting sent down the hospital. A couple weeks ago he had a high fever and since then he's had a mental illness where he's been totally out of touch with reality. He came to us hypothermic. The doctors wondered about typhoid fever that was high enough to mess up his brain, including its temperature regulation. It won't be an easy life for him to live out here where mental illnesses are understood even less than they are in the States, but he's a sweet kid and seems to have a family who loves him.Discussing Steven's care with Dr. Eric. Steven's doing really well. He has an appointment at the US Embassy in Port au Prince on Tuesday to apply for his medical visa and from there the last step will be to get the IBESR (something like Haitian social services) to agree to let him leave. If either of these don't go well, it could mean delaying getting him out of the country for his surgery for months so we could really use prayer! I've been continuously working on giving this back to God, trusting that it's really ALL in His hands. If all goes well, I'll be taking Steven to Indianapolis next Monday the 26th, where we'll be leaving him in the hands of his State-side guardians until his surgery at Riley Children's Hospital.

It’s amazing to me how much excitement we have in this far removed corner of the world. A couple nights ago, we got word that a lady had come to the mission to be seen for some injuries from a fall. I went down to find the lady waiting outside the mission gate with a crowd of people around her. Her family had carried her to us on a box-spring mattress-turned-stretcher with two long pieces of wood for handles. Her right leg had an open fracture, her collarbone was broken and I could see bone through the laceration on her head. It turned out that she hadn’t fallen; she’d had an avalanche of rocks fall on her. I learned that when people are working in their garden digging for yams, they dig deep holes and put rocks they find (some the size of small boulders) around the perimeter of the hole. David says that every year he’ll hear of people being killed or seriously injured when the rocks fall back down into the hole on top of people, and yet they continue to do it. It had taken her family a few hours to get her to us, walking part of the several miles, and catching a ride part of the way, so by the time she got here she at least had stopped bleeding. I got to work cleaning and covering the wounds and loading her up with antibiotics what little pain medication we have, while David made arrangements for his son, Josh, to drive her down the mountain to Cayes and the nearest hospital.
Another story I included in one of my emails but haven’t gotten around to putting on this blog happened a few weeks ago. A lady came to us just as we were finishing up work for the day. She had been pregnant but didn’t think the baby was due quite yet, so she walked about 9 miles to the market that morning. On the way home, she had walked about 2 miles, and then went into labor. The way she described it, the baby just slid out right away and passer-by’s helped cut the cord. This baby was very small and had a cleft palate as well as what looked like other neurological problems. So this dear lady walked another 3 miles to where we’re living for us to take a quick look at the child. She only stayed for a few minutes and then wanted to go home before it got dark. She would have walked (another 3 miles on the main dirt road and another mile on a slippery mud foot path) but a neighbor volunteered to take her by motorcycle. Of course I had to take a picture of this lady who had just given birth, walked three miles, was dealing with the shock of a child with serious deformities and was now straddling a motorcycle on a bumpy dirt road with her newborn in her arms! I visited the lady the next day and was really impressed with the way she was coping and caring for this baby in a culture where it would not be unheard of to call the baby a devil-child and throw it out to die. We ended up sending the baby down to the hospital for surgery to repair the cleft palate because he couldn’t have survived in these conditions as he was. I’m so grateful for the ability to send our critical patients to the hospital! It’s shocking how bad things can get for people when they can’t get any medical care because they can’t afford it.
On the whole I’m still doing really well out here. Every morning and into the afternoon I work with a Haitian girl named Jacqueline, who’s had training here in Haiti as a lab tech, and more recently, an American doctor spent two months training her in medicine. We don’t have an official ‘clinic’ here, but we usually see an average of 25 people every day anyway and as much to 40 people on a busy day. Jacqueline only speaks a couple words of English, but fortunately she’s smart enough to be able to figure out what I’m talking about as I butcher Creole. Our communication usually works with the patient explaining their symptoms in rapid paragraphs of Creole, Jacqueline simplifying it for me in Creole, my explaining treatment and medication in what must be pretty sad Creole from the looks that I get, and Jacqueline explaining to the patient what I’ve said so that they can understand it. It’s a little humbling when my Creole has to be re-translated, but I’ve only been here for two months so I guess I’ll need to have a little more patience. Fortunately, for the more complicated communication issues, David is often around and willing to translate. A lot of the people come for common complaints: headache, heartburn, a lot of asthma, simple infections or wound-care, etc., but every so often we do have more serious cases, like the one mentioned above, carried through the gate.
I’ve also gotten to spend a good amount of time getting to know people in the community. I love going for walks and visiting people at their homes. With few exceptions, living conditions in rural Haiti have improved very little over the past centuries. I took these pictures when I went to visit a man who works here at the mission when he was sick a couple days ago. On the way up to his house, we passed a few kids heading down to the mission for the feeding program. This is his mother-in-law as I found her when I walked up to the house, sweeping the yard. For pain, Haitians tend to tie tourniquets around the area that’s giving them grief. Sometimes the tourniquets will be simply strips of cloth, other times they’ll create a home-remedy compress of leaves, dirt and often more disturbing ingredients, and then tie the tourniquet over the compress. TiPelon had been having pain in his ribs so this is the compress that his mother-in-law had tied over them. It could’ve been worse, TiPelon is doing much better now.
Tomorrow, Steven will be going down to Cayes to get a letter from the hospital saying that the surgery he needs is one that can’t be provided in Haiti. That’ll be one step closer to getting him to the States!

Nearly two months old!

Steven, the baby we've been caring for with spina bifida, is getting so big! It's been so fun to get to see him grow from this tiny 5-day old infant to being now almost two months old and starting to show a little personality. Things are starting to move with getting him to the States for surgery, we hope I'll be able to take him out to Indiana in as soon as two weeks. He'll have the surgery at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis and some wonderful people in Indiana and around the country are working on raising the $24-32k (after a 20% discount given by the hospital) needed in funds to cover the surgery and hospitalization. If this is something you or someone you know would be interested in donating funds toward, please let me know.
It's really a miracle how things are moving but we still need several things to happen before we can get Steven to the States. Please join us in praying that things will continue to move quickly and smoothly!