Saturday March 27, 2010

Just sitting here at the guest house in the midst of actual calmness. Just the sound of the river down below in the valley with kids yelling out as they play and the swishing of the wash lady doing laundry at our faucet outside. Finally, a moment of nothing to do but sit here in the breeze.

I'm trying to remember what happened this week. It was a little crazy and turned us upside down for a few days. Rob returned from the Netherlands here on Sunday and the very next day a medical team from the States based out of a mission here from Saint Louis arrived. The same team has come for a few years to do a two or three day clinic here at our hospital. They arrived Monday and went to work setting up their own clinic in the hospital. They were with us for three nights which was nonstop hubbub considering they brought 52 people and all their stuff in tow. And considering our house isn't so big, tents in the field and mattresses lining our porch popped out everywhere. They were pretty good sports I must say, especially when we had a 20 minute downpour the first night. We got some new patients that will be hospitalized with us as well; heart failure, TB, wounds. All in all it was most nice to have docs to consult with for our cases we have been unsure about in the hospital.

But needless to say, we may have resembled chickens with our heads cut off this week as we were running from one thing to the next and answering questions. Um...we definitely carved out a few minutes every afternoon to drink a cold coke across the street at Evans'. I like to think it was necessary in order to keep our sanity (a little break time to talk, vent, laugh is vital here). The hardest point of the week however...Wednesday night. Eribendi, the three year old boy with Kwashiorkor we have been tube feeding every 2-3 hours for the past two weeks passed away. He took a turn for the worst rather quickly and was already gone by 8pm that night. We left all the hubbub at the house, and went down to the hospital to clean him and say goodbye. He was gone by the time we arrived. At one point, when we were alone with him and his father in the room, the father actually broke down into tears. Such a rare sight to see here in Haiti: for a father to weep quietly for his baby. I think he was able to do it because he was out of sight of the crowd (who would other wise yell at him not to cry) that had accumulated in the hall when they heard the mom wailing that her baby had died. The father was gracious to us. He seemed to accept this turn of events as he said he knew we had worked hard. He said he accepted that God had chosen to take him anyway.

That is that...

The quietness and calmness of Thursday kind of took me by surprise. The team and the movement and voices of 52 people were gone and we were no longer having to make runs to the hospital every few hours. A new kind of freedom; a little bittersweet. The cokes and talks with Sara and Esther have been a life saver as we process all this. Eribendi. The man we have who was shot through the spinal cord that left him paralyzed who we had to tell would never walk again. One of our TB patients who is not responding well after almost 2 months, who we learned is HIV positive (along with his wife). And what to do with Vigil, a TB patient from Passe Catabois who is also not responding to treatment despite every intervention we try. All of this is hard to take, but also the way of Haiti and just plain life itself...

We plan to take tomorrow to unwind at the beach...