day 6

Today was Sunday, and an off day for the mission where we're staying so we all split out to rural clinics. One team went to Junior Batay's (sp?), a haitian finishing his masters at Duke, who runs a local church/mission. That team also split their day and worked at an orphanage near Junior's church. Junior is a very influential man in Haiti who is drafting a letter to present to the UN on the future of Haiti. The team saw people at his church, as well as the kids at the orphanage. I was on a team that went to a town about an hour and a half outside of Port au Prince called Laigone (sp?). We were told it was a very hard hit town by the earthquake and when we arrived the news was confirmed. Nearly everything was leveled. The good thing is there seemed to be a lot of presence from groups like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. We set up in a local's house, a very nice house at that. There was a fridge, a flat screen TV, and a toilet. Not much else in the house but that's very wealthy by what I've seen so far. I worked with the dental team today which consisted of myself, an oral facial surgeon (Dr. Elliott Seagal) from Long Island, and an ER doc (Mike) from New Jersey. As the number of dental patients increased beyond anyone's ability to handle we decided to set up two chairs. Elliott saw patients in one chair and Mike and I saw patients in the other chair. What you learn quickly here is that what you can do back home is different that what you have to do here. Therefore, Mike used his 2 hours or so of dental training to do extraction. I have to say he did an excellent job and we saw some really rough and interesting dental cases. After a full day we hit the van and headed back to the mission, picking up some mangos along the way. We also stopped at Aventis Hospital to drop of Garrett (premed) so that he could work with Sean, a orthopedic surgeon who had been at the hospital all week doing ortho cases. There we met a little boy named Sebastion. Sebastion was about 6 or so and had is right leg amputated above the knee. He had been trapped in rubble during the earthquake for 3 days. During which he lost his entire immediate family. If you go to Aventis Hospital in Port au Prince and drive through the guarded gates the first person to greet you at the entrance is sure to be a beautiful, smiling little boy named Sebastion. Other than his missing limb and crutches, you would never know that he had experienced such a tragic event and lost so much. When he leaves the hospital he will go live with his aunt in a tent somewhere in the city.