Behind the Mountain: October Visit

I was blessed to be able to return to Haiti for a week this month. I, along with 4 other nurses, was back in Deye Mon from October 4-11. When I got back to the US, I hit the ground running and moved to Texas only 4 short days later, so I'm a little behind in blogging and posting pictures, so here we go!

The week was so busy and chaotic at times, but I believe God was using us in the lives of the patients we saw and the people we interacted with. After arriving at the Bustin's house on Saturday night, I woke up early on Sunday to be told that one of the village ladies had had her baby that morning right outside of her house as she was heading to the mission for help with the delivery. Three of the other nurses (I'm so glad they were there, as I'm pretty sure that my friend Earl, who is an RN from my hospital in California, and I would have been totally lost if we'd been left to try to deal with childbirth and all that comes afterwards by ourselves - I don't think that watching a delivery or two in nursing school exactly qualifies us to do the job) had gone down to help the mom and new baby who are both doing very well now. There must have been something in the air that day because another lady was carried to us who was also 9 months pregnant (RaeLeen said that this poor girl was actually tied onto a stretcher so that 8 men could carry her on their heads over the steep foot path without her falling off), but we ended up sending her down the mountain for an emergency c-section because she had toxemia.

From that moment on, we were running. We ran a clinic from Monday to Thursday and saw about 450 patients. It was an interesting clinic because the doctors we worked with were Haitian and I really enjoyed getting the chance to see how they did their diagnostics and treatment in a rural clinic setting. What made it more interesting was that one of these doctors was the medical director of our entire region of Haiti and is the person who's approval we need to do any healthcare work out there, so I was a little stressed about making sure we stayed on his good side!

Here's Earl working in the pharmacy. He'd picked up enough Creole in the first day or two to be able to give medication instructions to the patients by himself...it took me a couple weeks to learn as much as he learned in those first couple days.

I saw several familiar faces at the clinic. Kendy, the baby who I prepared bottles for every day last spring, was brought in by his mom. Kendy is the 9th child of a lady who was so malnourished that she wasn't able to nurse him and he lived the first two weeks of his life on sugar water until his mom brought him to the mission and told us about their needs. It worked out well to have another lady in the village prepare formula for Kendy throughout the summer months, but evidently the formula ran out sometime in September and he had gotten put back on sugar water as his only means of nourishment. For all that, he is such a happy baby and it was good to see that at least he's still alive. We did make sure he will be starting to get plenty of milk again.

Another familiar face was this sweet lady who I had spent nearly three months doing daily dressing changes for last spring. Earlier this year, she had been in a car accident that killed two of her children and left her with significant abdominal wounds. It was amazing getting to see the scars where her woulds had finally healed up a few days after I left in June.

Two of the nurses from Kansas spent time doing HIV education with the older kids. This kind of teaching is sorely lacking in Haiti and the people have a lot of inaccurate ideas about AIDS so this was very valuable!

As exciting as the clinic and everything was, my favorite time is really just getting to be spending time with people there and I wish I'd gotten to have more time just to hang out but when all we had was a week I think our time was well spent, I'll just have to make sure I go back soon for a longer visit. One thing I was able to do was hang out with the kids who live at the mission (there are 10 kids living there currently) every night and watch movies on my laptop with them. So far their all-time favorites seem to be The Sandlot, The Parent Trap and anything to do with soccer. Another thing the kids love is my iPod.

Apple will do really well when they decide to open a store in that village, the youth are already huge fans.

These are the three latest kids who have come to live at the mission. For those of you who didn't get my email update, the recent hurricanes have wiped out a ton of crops and they're seeing worse malnutrition in that area than they've seen in years. These three girls (left to right: Lonese, Vaglin and Melinda) are living at the mission because they're extremely malnourished. They'll stay there until their nutritional status has improved and then will go back to their families. Vaglin is about 8 years old and has been on the daily feeding program since last May but she was so bad off that most days she was too weak to make the 45 minute trek to the mission for a meal. Melinda also looks to be about 8 or 9 and Lonese is the youngest at 4 and weighs about 15lbs. We put Lonese in clothes intended for a two year old and she was swimming in them. Although all 3 are severely malnourished, they're all in very different places. Melinda is happy to be at the mission, loves getting to eat and really enjoys having so many playmates. Vaglin is to the point of malnutrition where she doesn't even want food, keeps to herself and very rarely smiles. Little Lonese appeared to go through a big improvement this week. She started out similar to Vaglin, no appetite or smile, but gradually started to eat more - she likes peanut butter on bread but not much else - as well as smile and play. The next picture is of Lonese on one of my last nights up there.

Hopefully God will continue to work in these little girls lives and bring restoration and healing.
Another cool thing to be able to see was how well Trameze is doing.

Last January Trameze was brought to the mission in much the same state of severe malnutrition as the other three girls. It is so wonderful to see her as she grows taller and visibly healthier, and also to watch her thoroughly enjoy life.

Spending some time visiting at a friend's house. Here's some of her family hanging out as dinner (the small black pot on the right) cooked over the fire of this outside kitchen. The mom was busy doing laundry and preparing dinner when we came.