Monday March 8
O revwa. Au revoir. Goodbye. After hugs and phone number exchanges with Haitian friends, and a goodbye to Sonson—who now has a reconstructed face and eyelid—we ride out of the hospital grounds, past the boy gang wearing blue surgical gloves on their right hands a la Michael Jackson, past the tented triage area where waiting patients, cheerfully hug each other in a long stationary conga line.
Most of the VI Haitian Relief team is returning to St. Thomas. So much has been accomplished, and now it is time to change gears somehow. The hospital administration will try to do more on its own and get a grip on its new identity. VIHR will continue to help and is now planning its new role.
Before the earthquake HCH had no more that 22 inpatients and a few emergencies each day. The pharmacy was the size of a large closet. Now there are hundreds of outpatients, international medical teams performing surgeries daily, and enough donated supplies and medicines to fill several thousand square feet of shelved storage. HCH will need more money and volunteer support if it is to continue this way, but it will also need to learn how to run a completely different organization than it ran before.
At the last morning meeting, Amy Gurlea, VIHF Logistics, handed over the procedures and supplies control manuals that we have assembled and explained the new systems–pharmacy requisitions, inventory controls, communication between visiting doctors, security
and hospital administration.
A materials manager is arriving next week to continue the organization. Imagine that you suddenly receive several thousand boxes of medicines: some mixed, some labeled only in Russian, Korean, Japanese and many narcotic and worth a lot as street drugs. More are arriving each day, and the task has taken about 10 volunteers working all day 7 days a week over the last two weeks to get to some semblance of order.
A few weeks ago our supplies room looked like a looted depot with ripped open boxes, garbage and bags of old clothes in pig-piles.
Now the supplies sit on neatly labeled shelves (from St. Thomas Home Depot!) and even have numbered zones and locked cabinets for the narcotics.
In the face of chaos and disorder, the VIHF and HCH teams have really made a difference to hundreds of patients.
March 4
Nobody can find Sonson, the handsome 9-year-old with an infected, permanently opened right eye and facial skin that is taut and thin from a burn injury.
A nurse from the Leap team of volunteer plastic surgeons noticed him running around the hospital grounds a few days ago and had their top doctor take a look. Today, they think they have a surgery slot for him for tomorrow morning at 8 and want to tell him.
Paul, a volunteer from Nantucket, Mass., who lost his parents at an early age, takes time every day to play with and give snacks to this roving band of kids, gathers them and asks them to find Sonson. Within minutes, they return running in a posse — here he is, quite fearful, probably wondering why he has been singled out.
Some nurses from Leap take another look, and give him eye ointment and eyewash, and I translate for them to ask him if he can come to the hospital tomorrow. He barely speaks, “oui”. We let him choose a meal from our stocks; he picks ravioli, spaghetti, hot dogs and peanut butter — like most 9-year-old boys, "non" to fruit and vegetables.
We make him a sandwich and set it out on a paper towel. He carefully folds up the paper towel around the sandwich and says he must bring it home to share with his family and can’t eat it here. So we pack up the food and clothes, but fearful that he will be robbed on the way home and also wanting to make sure an adult comes with him for the surgery, we walk for 25 minutes through a maze of 2- to 3-foot-wide alleys between shacks and tents and some houses, down a hill, through a valley and up again, and arrive at a small cluster of houses.
His sisters come out, the neighbors gather and bring out a big polished wooden chair for me. I sit, and explain in French. Oui, they say someone will bring him at 8. He looks terrified but leads us back to the hospital on the skinny dark byways, passing residents carrying giant water containers home for their families.
The day is very full. Most of the VIHF team are on a clinic truck, rigged up by Thomas Zellers, of St. Thomas Globe Electric, with a rollout tarp with poles so they can drive up to a tent city, roll out the roof, put out cots and start examining. They took flyers in Creole and appointment cards and saw dozens of patients, many of them amputees, and organized for them to return for care. The head of the team, Jeff Quinlan, along with organizer Amy Gurlea, Dr. Jason Snow of St. Croix , nurse Ashley Mortimer (formerly St. Croix) and prosthetic specialist Leah Coffman returned exhausted but happy that so many amputees are now incorporated into the medical system and have the chance to walk and function more normally.
