Mobile Clinic

One thing can be said about CONASPEH’s newly formed Central Committee on Health… once they get an idea in their head, they GO with it. The members which include the young and enthusiastic (and working for free due to lack of funds) Dr. Charcot, Miss Fano, Francois Villier, and Miss Altena (director of the nursing school) as well as myself. All get along and are dedicated to health care, education and outreach. I cannot say enough how happy I am working with a team, a committee of professionals. After starting this missionary assignment and feeling lost, disoriented and yearning for a Haitian guide through an unfamiliar system, suddenly I find myself amidst a core group of intelligent, motivated, enthusiastic people dedicated to health care in Haiti. Brainstorming is brilliant, opinions voiced, information shared and action taken in the course of an hour. And after the meetings end, I love venturing out with my “teammates” on adventures in medicine, in the attempt to better serve the people of Haiti.

Our first meeting was a month ago where we brainstormed projects, outreach and ancillary training for the nursing school. Since then we’ve started a health membership program for the CONASPEH churches that brings in a little money to help purchase medical supplies. We’ve started a weekly clinic outreach in Pont Sonde. The first week of clinic was enormously successful, and our follow-up week had plenty of new and re-visiting patients reassuring us that our presence there is certainly valued by the members of the community.

Today was our first organized mobile clinic outreach as a team. Our destination was a small village church up the mountain from Carrefour. Dr. Charcot, Miss Fano, MIss Altena and 2 nursing students loaded into the Galloper at dawn and were off. After driving through packed markets, weaving through pedestrians, street dogs and pot holes, urging the Galloper up the steep and eroded path that served as a “road” to the small community, we finally parked in a huddle of homes. From there, we loaded up our supplies. I had a duffle of medicines on one shoulder, my bag of diagnostic tools on another. Miss Altena walked with a box full of pharmaceuticals on her head. Miss Fano carried the wound care equipment, Dr. Charcot another box of meds, and a couple of boys from the village helped us find our way to the make-shift clinic. The pastor who had arranged the mobile clinic lead us through a narrow walk way, weaving between cement and tin home, along a cliff face where the trail merged into the width of one of my shoes. Traversing the narrow walk way with bags the size of small adults was interesting, to say the least.

We huffed and puffed our way down steep banks, up steps in the hill made out of old tires and through a neighborhood of cinder block houses with life underway. We passed a mother braiding her daughter’s hair, a young woman breast feeding her infant, a teenager hanging out the family’s clothes on the line, men playing dominos and others just watching the spectacle of the strange train of people stumbling by. The mountains surrounding the village were patchworked with farmed plots of land, terraced up the mountain slopes.

We found the church to be a cinderblock structure wearing a tin roof for shelter and teetering on a hillside. The church members had cleaned an area where the children usually meet and made it into a temporary clinic. A man had been announcing our coming by bull-horn for hours before, and we were welcomed by a “waiting room” full of expectant patients.

The following hours were spent seeing the people of this hill-side town. The nursing students practiced taking vital signs and blood sugars with the help of Miss Altena. Miss Fano manned the pharmacy, and Dr. Charcot and I welcomed patient after patient, sharing an old cot as an exam table. We saw a young boy we suspected to have advanced Ricketts, a pregnant woman with dysentery, kids with coughs, old men with knee pain, an 80 year-old woman with severe curvature of the spine who complained of “getting tired” once in a while. We treated would-be malaria, anemia, and pneumonia. We suspected a case of Tuberculosis and another case of Sickle-cell crisis and referred as such.

The day was busy but fun, the mood jovial as all of the “team” involved was buried in the work we all trained (and love) to do.

We returned home tired and hot, but happy. Today we made it possible for people to get affordable medical care in a place where the walk to an established clinic is long and expensive.

Miss Fano is already busy scheduling mobile clinics in the weeks to follow. I’m excited about adventures to come. When day dreaming of being a doctor doing international work, I pictured myself a lot like we were today: hot, sweaty, hauling supplies over uneven terrain, seeing people who hadn’t bothered seeking out a doctor for their chronic cough, persistent fever or dehydrating diarrhea.

Today was a success. Rewarding. The journey is well underway. And I'm loving every minute of it.