haiti update - june 12, 2010

“Righteous are you, O Lord, and your laws are right. The statutes you have laid down are righteous; they are fully trustworthy.” Psalm 119:137

Hi! This week was busy dealing with emergencies. It was good to have a couple of visitors from Canada, Angela and Mike, who are both nurses to help deal with them. We brought Annuelle to Bernard Mevs Hospital for physiotherapy with her artificial leg on Tuesday and while we were leaving the gates saw a group of people carrying a woman from the hospital. The emergency department had told the people to bring the woman to a maternity hospital. They were heading to Airport Rd. in search of a tap-tap. We offered to transport her and brought them over to Chancerelles Maternity Hospital on Rte. Nationale #1. The woman was unconscious but shortly after arriving at the hospital she woke up. It looks like she and her baby are going to be alright. Pray for the health of this mother and that the rest of her pregnancy will not have any more problems.
A couple of public health workers from Grace Childrens’ Hospital came over to talk with our students about tuberculosis. We talked with them about Junior and they brought us over a paper to register him for testing. Angela went with him to get a chest x-ray and sputum tests done. Friday morning we picked up the x-ray results and brought Junior for blood work at a local laboratory. Friday afternoon Angela called us while we were out and said to get back quickly as Junior had collapsed with severe abdominal pains and coughing. We loaded him into the truck and brought him to the Bernard Mevs/Project Medishare Hospital. They looked at the x-ray we had and diagnosed him with tuberculosis. They can’t accommodate TB patients there and they arranged for him to be admitted at General Hospital. International Medical Corps works out at General Hospital and we met some of the personnel who were working in the emergency room. The tuberculosis room is actually a tent in the courtyard of the hospital. Megan is an American doctor whose specialty is tuberculosis and she arranged for Junior to start on the TB meds right away. She has been running the TB tent since January. He only needed to stay one day in the hospital and will spend the next 6 months here at Coram Deo. Hopefully with good nutrition and the medicine he will be strong and healthy again. Junior has had a difficult time since the earthquake. Both his parents were killed in the quake and he is now responsible for his younger sister. She is staying with friends of the family right now. We have had a lot of visitors staying here at Coram Deo since the earthquake. We don’t know when Junior first contracted tuberculosis so we advise everyone who spent time here to get a TB test just to be safe. Pray for Junior, that he is healed from his TB and that nobody else here at Coram Deo or the Adventist refuge camp comes down with TB.
Many times discussions here in Haiti result in fights. On the weekend a young woman came into the yard bleeding from wounds that a group of people had given her. She had an injury to her hand from a human bite, puncture wound to her arm caused by an ice pick and wound to her face caused by a rock. Angela and Mike patched her up and told her to get a tetanus shot and get stitched up at the Medecins Sans Frontieres Tent Hospital on Delmas 31.
Usually it is the men who fight more than the women but this week it seems that the women were fighting more. I was walking on the street near the house and a couple of women with rocks in their hands were shouting at and insulting a woman who was inside her tarp house. I was tempted to tell them “Let she who is without sin cast the first stone” but didn’t because they may have launched their stones in my direction!
Kimosabee had some troubles this week. He snapped a belt and it ended up winding around the fan in the Delmas 75 area. We first found a safe location for him at another missionary’s place and then I told the visitors that we would go on foot and use public transportation to finish what we were doing. This way they could experience how the Haitian population gets around the city. They enjoyed the experience! The mechanic fixed Kimosabee the next morning and we were able to drive around again.
Some refuge camps are located on private land. One such camp is the Palais de L’Art camp on Delmas 33. The owner is pressuring the people to leave, as he wants to use his facilities again. The people have nowhere to go to. One afternoon last week we were driving near the Palais de L’art just as some individuals were putting obstacles on Delmas 33 to block traffic. We spoke with the people and asked what was going on and they told us that the owner locked the gate of the camp and they couldn’t get inside to where their children and wives were. They were organizing a protest. Shortly after the police showed up and the protest ended. People ended up having to climb over the wall to get into the camp. Later in the week I saw the gate open for a period of time but also saw barbed wire on half of the wall and broken bottles on the top of the wall. Pray for the people in this camp. They say that they feel like they are now in prison. They don’t know where to go. The owner has requested the government to transfer them to another area. This is a common situation throughout the city on both government and private lands where the camps are located. There are just as many people (if not more) living in the camps now as there were right after the earthquake. Pray for a place to put them all.
The dormitory is finished! The electrical work and painting was done this past week and now everyone can sleep inside again! Pastor Pierre and the cement boss have been busy reconstructing and repairing the back area of the yard. The side wall is also a wall in our neighbor’s house and I told him ahead of time that we would be taking down his wall/house to repair the wall. He didn’t mind and now it is fixed. Mike and the guys also took down the back wall that was leaning in one piece against our neighbor’s house. When the rubble was cleared we noticed that the neighbors house wall is not good. Our neighbors are squatters and the house they live in is unfinished, but the wall is about 12 feet high. Instead of creating another boundary wall we extended our property space 3 feet and blocked off the neighbors corridor and created support pillars to prevent their wall from coming down against us in another earthquake. The closing of the corridor helps to improve our security as well. We told the neighbors if they wanted us to build a boundary wall they would have to contribute half of the costs. We are now parging the wall. Next step is to repair the cracks in the roof of the house. Water seems to be leaking inside the house somewhere when it rains. We are also planning on converting an area at the back to a storage room/depot near the new dormitory for the people in the dorms. Thank you for your financial support to make these repairs possible!
That’s all the news for today. Have a good week!
Karen Bultje, Coram Deo