Shadda – an urban contrast where a clinic waits for Christmas miracles.
November 25
On our last day, the 25th, I use my time catching up on my marketing tasks in the guesthouse and paying a visit to Dr. Brinvert’s school clinic, next door. Sitting outside his office is the only amputee I have seen in this village. He was amputated below the knee because he didn’t heed strong, repeated advice to have a gangrenous toe taken off. Fear and a good surgeoneventually saved his life. It’s early to bed for an early start on the 2 hours drive to Cap Haitien. In the morning we say goodbyes and are given a joyoussend off by squealing, waving kids and the two HVH dogs, determined to follow us all the way, if they could. Squeezed between hockey bags, other volunteers and the translators in the back of HVH’s only pick-up, I get to see Haiti by back roads close up.
The clinic experience at Shadda (a partnership between HVH and SOIL – Sustaining Organic Integrated Livelihoods), a slum within Cap Haitien, is in stark contrast to the rest of the medical initiatives of this mission. Although it is very small, the facility is clean and recently painted. In just one small reception area and two tiny rooms, 35 to 50 patients are registered and treated two days a week. Outside, lining narrow alleyways, are maybe 2500 homes of tarpaulins, poor quality cement block and rusty tin jammed together sheltering a community of perhaps 20,000.
24 pregnant women are registered and lined up for examinations, blood and urine tests, vitamins, and safe birthing kits. As with every opportunity, the MD’s offer hands on training and advice to the Haitian nurses and family doctor who run the clinic regularly. I chit chat with a clown (what the…!) Franck Lamy, who lives in the shantytown – he goes around in oversized running shoes and funny cloths to lighten the mood of parents andchildren. He repeatedly insists that I come back and bring them lots of soccer balls and shoes.
Now I have seen front line medicine from both sides - in lush, cleaner rural Haiti and in the arid, dusty pollution of a slum in thecountry’s second largest city. There is endless work to do. Dr. Keenan, the founder of Haiti Village Health, is hopeful that a recent grant from the Masons will build a proper clinic in Bod Me Limbe and expand the Shadda facility next year. The challenge, as with any growing NGO, is finding the operating funds to make the whole effort sustainable. Christmas is coming in Haiti, too.
Photo archives at: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjx1pJ5V
