Day 7

Today was our last day of clinics. One team stayed at the mission, one team went to another Delmar clinic, and one team staffed General Hospital. I worked today in the general clinic at the mission. There we see sick patients, and do wound care and surgery. For some reason today we a tons of wound care. I drained an infected above knee amputation on a 4 year old girl, cleaned and redressed numerous other wounds, sutured a guys eyebrow, debreded a fresh second degree burn, and saw the biggest inguinal hernia I have ever seen. Oh, and diagnosed a case of malaria. As you can imagine it was a busy day. Tonight we are spending our final night at the Le Plaza hotel in Port au Prince. The amazing thing about Le Plaza is that inside is a resort style hotel with a swimming pool, air conditioning, and a dinning room with white linen clothes and outside are millions of people with no homes, no food, and nowhere to go. As I look around I see all the staff and I think that all of these people will leave here tonight after being dressed nice, waiting on people and spending there day in a luxurious (by haitian standards) and go home to their families in tents, homemade shacks, on on the streets. It's a very sad but true realization. I leave Haiti really wondering about their future. They've never really had great times but now the quality of life in Haiti has plummeted. How long can they live in tents and in filth? How long will help last, and then what? There is no governmental structure and never really has been. The people look to God and the government to take care of things, but then what? Even if the millions of dollars and aid that has been raised does start getting funneled in where to start? No home are livable. There's just rubble.
I would like to say though that there are some people in Haiti really trying to make a difference. Our drivers/local guides/clinic organizers/everything else men Daniel and Richard were amazing. We pay these guys $40/day to be at our beckoning call and they were. We needed something they got it. They are amazingly hard working and smart guys with enormous hearts. I can't say enough about them. The children at the mission, all of which are orphans, swept and mopped the clinic floors everyday before and after clinic with huge smiles on their faces. They helped us carry our things, they always said thank you, and they made our trip worthwhile no matter what. I cannot imagine the tragedy they had lived and yet they smile and love everyone. The interpreters that helped us everyday were volunteers. they spent 12 hours or more everyday translating for us. Each person basically had their own interpreter for the day. That means 37 people came everyday to volunteer their time and energy to help us help the people of Haiti. Every rural clinic we went to, we had absolutely no problem finding people off the streets to volunteer to help us translate. I think that level of commitment, love, patriotism, what ever you want to call it is amazing. The future of Haiti looks very bleak but I think that it's guys like Richard and Daniel, our interpreters, and those smiling children that will really determine the future of Haiti.
Tonight will be my last blog from Haiti but when I return on Wed., I will be posting a series of blogs that will contain pictures, each with it's own story. I hope to keep these going for a while to give everyone a more visible picture of what we saw and experienced. Thank you for tuning in and thank you for supporting us.