Monday, October 27, 2008

I had to take an angry timeout yesterday; listen to some angry music while I cracked some beans for dinner. Annelies, Dustin, and I had returned from delivering an 8 month old baby home who had died at our house. I was just angry with this whole place. Everything is so wrong sometimes. Here are two parents, HIV positive, know it, refuse to take medication for free, and go on to have two more babies. Are they careless? Or is the understanding and intellect not there?

After we told the parents their baby had died, they both nodded like they knew it was coming and then the mom stood and round around doing her Haitian wailing (the norm when someone has died). The sad thing is that it's all a show. I thought the dad could be genuinely sad but we soon found out he was more sad about the cost of the funeral, also a source of my anger. One, that this was the dad's first response and two, this is what is helping to kill Haiti. The cost of a funeral (which seems to be socially mandatory) could feed this already poor family for I don't know how many days. They sit there with tears in their eyes, asking for money, but how can we support such a thing, when we need to use the money to keep people alive? And the honesty of it all is so hard to tell; the story is always changing. We were a little burnt out that day after sending two people home from the hospital for uh...bad behavior. And in the midst of all this tet chaje with money, there was a little boy who just needed some relief and comfort before he died.