A Day Out

Friday January 30, 2009
Today I got to go on a little adventure to Port de Paix. Anne-Marie and I set out in the Land Rover with a to-do list, that included getting an X-ray for a deaf man with a leg broken to the point that only the muscles and some skin are holding it together (he was on a stretcher in the back). We also took his two caregivers and two HIV patients for transport to their appointments at the bigger hospitals in town.
Check one: we made it through the mud and across the river, everyone and everything intact.
Check two: didn’t turn out so well. We went to Imaculee, the biggest hospital in Port de Paix but the X-ray machine was broken (going on three months… Haiti… grrr…). But Anne-Marie took the opportunity to show me around a little and made contacts with the Dr. in charge of the HIV and TB programs there.
Check three: city hall. We needed to get birth certificates redone for the two boys we had sent to House of Hope late last year to be adopted out, since the names were wrong and they had no record of the mothers’ deaths. It was sketchy, to say the least. A tiny room, crammed with four desks and stacks and stacks of dusty record books. The men behind the desks told us it couldn’t be done, so we tried to be pretty friendly. I somehow made friends with a police officer who also started telling Anne-Marie all his medical problems when he found out she was a doctor. Ha! He said he liked my eyes…good grief…but I’m sorry to say maybe being two white girls helped the process. We walked out with two redone birth certificates, exactly how we needed them.
Check four: A deviation from the plan. Drive to LaPointe to give their X-ray machine a go. Somehow try to transport our deaf man from the car to the hospital to the X-ray; Anne-Marie ended up yelling at a few Haitian men sitting on their butts watching her sweat carrying the stretcher (all jokes of course). Waiting, waiting, waiting, but in the meantime we were able to personally take the new birth certificates to Jenny at House of Hope and I gave my baby, Frisner (now Max) a kiss and got to say hi to my buddy, Frandy.
Check five: Back to Port de Paix for some shopping. A supermarket decked out with Valentine’s merchandise, and, no joke, tins of Kirkland Signature Valentine’s day chocolates for sale for $425 Haitian dollars ($53 American) and other fun things to look at when you realize, yes, I’m still in Haiti. A bookstore that was really a dusty hole in the wall, but pretty exciting none-the-less. And the local flea market.
Check six: We made it back through the river and over the bumpiest of bumpy roads in one piece and our deaf man still wearing the biggest smile.