A Haiti Medical Missionary Trip
Part II
Day Three: The Return
The next morning I find my way downstairs and drink more than my fair share of coffee. Pastor Julio looks as if he had a refreshing job around the island of Hispanola and stands ready to climb Mount Everest with the lot of us on his back.
We drive back to Juchereau and observe something that we have not seen since arriving in Haiti: a police officer! He is using the United Nation checkpoint to do a little checking of his own.
Unlike at customs, we do not have our guardian angel, Wilbert, with us and the police officer politely informs us that our van is missing some obscure piece of paperwork. Our guides discuss the matter with him for a long time. There are guns everywhere. The UN soldiers have them, the police officer has them, and a lot of other people around them without guns are carrying machetes as long as your arm. The only people without weapons are us, so we stay put.
We end up loading all the equipment and people into the truck and leave our guide to work on freeing our van. We don’t have to wait too long before the guide shows up at the church. The policeman grew tired of the situation and said, "give me forty U.S. dollars and we’ll consider it taken care of." It seemed a fair toll.
We set up inside the church and by now, word has spread. People are coming from long distances and there is some desperation among those who want to see the doctors. After our visit, no one could say when another doctor would come back again.
One of the other doctors assists a patient who, at first, looks like a one-week-old girl in a dress. When he conducts the exam he learns that it is a boy in a pretty dress. Perplexed, the doctors learns that this child’s mother lost two other babies, both males. The local Voodoo Shaman had suggested that the mother fool the evil spirits by dressing her baby as a girl. The approach seems to be working.
The onslaught of ill children continues, a few are suffering from protein malnutrition while others have severe heart murmurs. The list goes on. I still find it a bit surreal to be in the stifling heat surrounded by all this while distributing Flintstone’s chewable vitamins as fast as I can.
Our day comes to an end and we prepare for our journey back to the compound before the sun sets. Leaving Juchereau for the last time is a hard thing to do, as the people we treated were so grateful for the few things we could do for them.
As an emergency medicine doctor, I am often confronted by patients who are angry over a several hour wait to have a CAT Scan, labs and a host of other sophisticated tests that are completed on demand, at any hour of the day. In Haiti, we distributed some vitamins, de-worming medicines and some antibiotics to people who had walked three hours only to wait three more before receiving attention. And they were grateful. (A smile still comes to my face as I recall the patients of Juchereau.)
We load our supplies into our two vehicles and it takes us two and a hours to reach the compound. Pastor Julio is at it again, and I find some coffee before collapsing. Our next destination is a village called Borde.
Day Four: Borde
Day four breaks and our team is ready. If nothing else, Borde is closer which means less time on the spleen-rupturing roads. We ready ourselves to run a clinic at another church. This one is run by another of Haiti’s amazing Pastors, Pastor Marius.
Pastor Marius has an incredible story. This young man works with two churches, the one in Borde and another in Cap Haitian. He travels via motorcycle, the best mode of transportation over these roads. He is by any Haitian measure a successful man and someone genuine in his faith. However, not everyone celebrates the success of their neighbor, even if he is a pastor.
On Carnivale Night in 2005, Pastor Marius’ car broke down. He sent his wife and five children home and began working on his car. As he did, he was shot in the back at close range by a man he knew, a neighbor. The reasons are unclear. The bullet sliced through Pastor Marius’ back, destroying his spleen and puncturing a lung. The damage was immense. It should have been a fatal shot.
Pastor Marius lay there on the ground, presumed dead for some hours before anyone missed him. On finding him, deep in shock and laying in a pond of his own blood, his family contacted Wilbert who quickly found a surgeon who came back to Haiti for Carnivale. They operated and though he had a small chance at survival, this man of faith pulled through. He still requires additional surgery for which they have spent a year trying to arrange his passage to the United States.
Pastor Marius still lives in the same neighborhood with his family, as does the gunman. The police were not interested in pursuing the matter.
It was a particularly humbling to be visiting this man’s church to conduct a clinic. We set up quickly after seeing the number of patients. The sickest is a patient seen by our obstetrician. The patient was in the middle of a "septic miscarriage," in which the uterus is severely infected. It can easily be fatal for the mother. We arrange for her to be brought to a rudimentary hospital in Milot, a nearby city. Though minimally equipped, the hospital offers more than we have at Borde. The patients at Borde are very sick, though we did not understand why. On a brighter note, the school associated with the church asks us to give checkups to the students, so we are able to see some healthy children.
One the ride home we stop in Milot to visit an historic site. We are not welcomed by the people in the street, and I cannot help but think twice about our decision to come here.
A frustrating thing happens as we head back through the town. We see the young woman from the clinic suffering from the septic miscarriage walking home. They refused to do the necessary procedure and, instead, had given her some antibiotics and sent her on her way. At home, as doctors, we would have lit up the staff of our hospital for such a thing, but here we held no authority. I do not know if she survived.
We make it back to the compound and settle in for the night. It is around 8 p.m. when we hear an enormous popping sound, almost an explosion and the lights dim for a moment. Things remain a little tense until we discover what happened. It turns out that a man was trying to throw a metal pole with a hook over the power lines and steal electricity. While he was unsuccessful, he did manage to destroy the transformer outside the compound, so that was the end of our government-supplied power. While electricity was only available every other night, it was still nice to have the ceiling fan going to move some air around. Once the mission generator went off at 9:30 each night, there would be no more power.
Lacking remorse, the man waves at us, smiles and walks away, leaving his pole behind.
Days Five & Six: The Weekend
The weekend is a bit of a loss from a medical standpoint. Sunday is church day in the highly Christian society, and Saturday is a day to get ready for Sunday. Wilbert had arranged for us to go to one of the resort beaches in Haiti. While that must sound like an extreme oxymoron, the island offers some gorgeous beaches and the one we are to visit is called The Cormier.
UN personnel relax here along with people on religious and medical missions. We are told that the beach was 15 to 20 minutes away. I am sure that’s accurate in "Haiti Time," though in "New York Time" that means more like an hour and a half.
What has impaled this trip in my memory banks–not embedded, not anchored, not etched, but impaled–is the fact that we had to travel over a mountain, while standing in the back of a dump truck with no sides, to get to the beach. I found myself looking from the side of the truck as we inched closer and closer to the edge of the road and the several hundred foot drop. I begin planning how I would get out of the truck in case of a rollover.
Our hosts want us to have a relaxing time and for us to recharge our batteries for the next set of clinics. The beach, I must admit, is stunning, and that’s coming from a Hamptonite. The fact that we had to cross that same mountain again to return home somewhat diluted the restorative powers of the Haitian waters.
Having survived Saturday, we attended church in Borde with Pastor Marius. Aware of the wounds he received, I stood amazed as he preached with unbridled passion to his flock. He is wearing a suit in 100-degree weather and giving a sermon that must have been as much of a workout as one leg of a ironman triathlon. I half expected him to collapse at the rate he was going, but he did not.
On Monday we visited the Cap Haitian Clinic. Pastor Julio, who had volunteered for the first two days of our trip, is now in his fifth day of translating. Lindsey, our pediatric team nurse, Pastor Julio and I experience one of those rare times when you meet someone you bond with from the first encounter. I was thrilled to have him translating again.
The clinic is swamped. As with all our visits, we did our best to see and treat everyone. Once again, the sick children piled in. Perhaps the sickest child is a young girl named Marlie, who has a severe heart murmur. She complained of symptoms whenever she played with other children. Her health remains uncertain.
The day ends and we hand over our remaining medical supplies to the nurse at the clinic, Madam Kesnel, and return to the compound. Tomorrow will be our last day in Haiti and the thought of seeing my wife and daughters again has me wishing the clock hands around the face at light speed.
The Wait & Reflection
As we settle in for the night, we experience our first rain on the
trip. The storm is a violent affair with lightening and driving rain. During one of the lulls, we hear a shotgun blast right outside the compound walls. At first we think it’s the transformer again, though the man with the pole had taken care of that possibility a few days ago.
I sit and listen. There is always an energy during emergencies: shouting or movement. There are two dogs in the compound and I wait to hear their barking. I strain my ears but I cannot hear anything. No one is seeking help for a gunshot wound, and no one is trying to enter the compound. I continue to sit in the darkness of that hour, with the storm around me, and use a mini-flashlight so as not to attract any attention as I flip through a small picture album of my family.
Our lead physician had joked earlier in the trip that should kidnappers show up, he had brought his checkbook. I start to think I should have brought a few blank checks of my own.
Morning arrives without incident or explanation of the events of the night before. The storm has knocked the dust down quite a bit for which we are thankful. We leave Living Hope Mission and Haiti around midday.
So my trip has ended and the question remains: Why Haiti?
It comes as no surprise that the question no longer matters. The real question is: Will I return?
There is a terrible truth that must be faced. It’s the part of the story of the young man and the many starfish that they don’t tell you: Sooner or later you are going to have to leave the beach. Whether it is because of hunger or exposure or fatigue, you will have to lay down the burden and leave. The thousands left will look at you, and you will think: Why not one more? In that moment you must decide if you are a one-time visitor or an active participant. Will you return or not?
I believe that I will return to Haiti because it is no longer a place on a map to me, but a place where remarkable people I have come to value live. Wilbert and Meg Merzilius can leave anytime they wish, both are U.S. citizens. They could get on a plane today, but they stay as they have for the past 14 years working to better the lives of those around them.
I will return because Pastor Marius won’t leave. He will awake today, just as he has for every day this past year, knowing that the man who shot him lives only a few doors away. He knows this, but he continues to preach and build his ministry and riding his motorcycle on the dusty and sometimes muddy roads that span the many miles between his churches.
I will return to see my friend Pastor Julio and share in his laugh and smile.
I will return because being a physician is about service and not about privilege.
I will return because of Marlie and My Love.
I will return because I can.
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