October 4th to 18th

Sorry for the delay in posting this!!

I spent the rest of Sunday hiking up the hills behind the mission- it was really nice to get out and to something active for a change!  The walk up was really beautiful and on our way we met a few people who lived in the hills either tending to livestock or to their crops. Thankfully my Creole good enough now to communicate and show a little confidence too … apparently its voodoo territory up there :)

First thing Monday morning Madame Lucien came into the prosthetics clinic holding Kelly (the boy I made the brace for). His breathing was very shallow and quick, his face was almost white and his body was limp. She casually told me he was sick and handed him to me with a smirk… I ran him up the hill to our emergency room where I was met by Eimear who got him hooked up to the monitor and started him on a nebulizer.

Kelly was on the verge of respiratory arrest when he came in and wasn’t stable until the afternoon but thankfully he came round and because we had a couple of really competent prosthetists in at the beginning of the week I was able to sit in as his mum for the day (as Madame Lucien had actually only come in for her diabetes tests and left immediately after that without saying a word).  It turns out Kelly had pneumonia which was thought to be because of an infection in his chest that had gone on too long -unfortunately that same morning a baby who was about 6 months old (but looked like a new born) came in with the same symptoms and didn’t make it.

Needless to say it was a tough day for all of us and when Kelly was able to leave the clinic I took him down to the lab where he slept until we finished work about 6. After that I quickly grabbed dinner at the guesthouse with Kelly, Andrew and Eimear then headed down to the patient tent for the night to stay with two of our prosthetic patients who were spending the next couple nights there. Petit-Frere and Rosemie are both 24 but were too scared to stay alone so we just hung out, they plated my hair and taught me a few words and in the morning we did some yoga together :)

The rest of the week didn’t go as well as we had hoped due to some problems with the new prosthetist who had been retired for over 10 years and was indifferent to the standard of care we were trying to uphold. We were scheduled to fit 4 new patients that week but all 4 left without their legs due to poor fit and other major concerns with socket alignment. I think all of us were relieved when he decided that he wouldn’t be staying the month, especially poor David as the prothetist had been force feeding him beef jerky all week (which David told me tasted like socks haha)

Things at the orphanage have been bitter sweet lately as Madame Lucien has expressed that she trusts Kenley and me so the mission has been encouraging us to go (which means we get vehicles easily) but it also puts us in a really fragile position; we had a bit of an issue last week when one of the young translators had asked a few of the children some questions about food and hygiene. Unfortunately, that got back to Madame Lucien and she was pretty upset about the whole thing.

Thankfully there are some really good things that have come out of all our work there.

Last week I went into Port Au Prince to meet with the director of the residential school for children with disabilities so that we could have Stanley (a boy from Good Sam who is deaf) transferred there. When we arrived they requested we do a test to see how much he could hear. The test was actually just them ringing a bell very loudly behind him and seeing if he responded in any way- not the standard way of doing it but effective none-the-less :) 

I’ve decided put my other projects on hold for the moment as most of them depend on other people and won’t be taking shape for sometime. Instead, I’ve been spending heaps of time teaching Kenley (the boy I’ve sponsored) about sustainability and how to start spreading it in his community, which I visited last week.

 

More to come soon….