Leaving Haiti

Now you can view all the photos I took in Haiti. Stay tuned for more photo captions in the albums and more stories here on this blog.

I want to thank you all for your interest in and support of my efforts down in Haiti. I give special thanks to my Colville clinic Northeast Washington Medical Group and our CEO Ron Rehm for their offer recently to donate towards covering a small portion of my trip costs. I will continue to be grateful for any more donations anyone desires to give. It means alot to me that people so far away from the suffering are willing to sacrifice to support aid efforts like this. Also, I want to thank Heart To Heart International and its wonderful staff for giving me this opportunity to get to know and serve the Haitian people. HHI really is a great organization to work with and needs more volunteers to help the greatly needed free urgent care clinics go on further in Haiti.

A middle-aged woman took her spot on the beach clinic bench Tuesday and asked me to end her pregnancy because she has nothing and can't stand to give this horrible life to another child. Then she called her five born children over and said that, in fact, she would like me to take all of them away, since she has no food, no water, no father, no home, no future for them. I could hardly keep from crying. All I could do was testify of God's love for her and her family and that I believed things would get better soon for them. I gave her prenatal vitamins and treated her anxiety and insomnia and wished her and her children the best. Once again I felt quite helpless facing the overwhelming needs in Haiti.

Wednesday I came back to Port-au-Prince after running the Leogane clinic site for 6 days. I'll miss the peaceful hospitable Mennonites we stayed with there, but it's nice to have more than a cold trickle for a shower again and not be bitten by malaria-laden mosquitoes every evening. Fortunately it looks like my Malarone worked and I didn't get malaria.

My last clinic work in Haiti was running a mobile clinic from a taptap (covered pickup) Thursday morning with a great ER nurse Anita, one of our best translators Callix, and a helpful med student Alex. We pulled up to a tent city a few blocks from our main Bel Air church/clinic location, and as soon as they saw a doctor, people started swarming to the back in a rough line seeking medical care. We treated the usual problems of gastritis, diarrhea, dehydration, anxiety, insomnia, wound infections, hypertensive emergencies, heart failure, eye/airway irritation, bladder/sexual infections, and musculoskeletal pain from sleeping on the concrete. After seeing 17 patients in two hours, there were still plenty of people wanting to be seen, but it was time to switch out with another doctor so I could go catch the UN flight to Santo Domingo. Crowd control sure was an adventure. I got to the point of conducting about 60% of the interview in Creole, and it was great to connect with these grateful and resilient people in their language. I told every one of them "God bless you" and pray they will be a little better off for my seeing them.

I had a nice free UN humanitarian aid flight to the Dominican Republic, a relaxing night at the bed and breakfast in Santo Domingo, a special time seeing my physician-assistant uncle Bill in Ft. Lauderdale during my layover there, and a good night sleep last night at my parents' place after arriving on a late flight, and now I'm heading back up to Colville to finally be with my wife and kids again. But I'm still having dreams and thoughts about all the people needing help but there being no way to get to them all, and I keep thinking at first that any slight building shaking I feel could be an earthquake. My heart continues to ache for the seemingly unending suffering rampant throughout Haiti. Even more than when I returned from serving in Ukraine as a missionary for two years, I am having some culture shock as I return to see so much frivolousness in our world, and I'm reminded that we in our nicely developed countries have so very much. I hope we will avoid wastefulness and idleness and work for the good of others and share with those who need more. Haiti has left a lasting impression on me and hopefully will change us all for the better forever, though I'm sure we imperfect humans will need plenty of reminders.