Bassin Bleu

I have been gunning to visit Bassin Bleu in Jacmel since I got to Haiti last summer and, after having worked with a youth group from Minnesota who was staying at the school for a week, they invited me to join them on their great adventure.

You hike out a little ways, over beautiful trails occupied by washers

See gorgeous, blue pools.

Approach an edge where you are told to take off your shoes and hold on tight.

You reach this ledge where you have to jump in, and you think it is beautiful already

When you emerge from your dive, you see this.

It was an incredible, incredible day in this beautiful country that I live in.

Oh, and in case you need a laugh, here is Rigan, an FSIL grad who came with us, bedecked in Packers gear and playing with my ukulele over some stunning vistas. Rigan runs a clinic in a very rural part of Haiti relatively near Leogane and is the sole healthcare provider for thousands of people. 

Fete Gastronomique

Sunday was the festival of Books and Food at FSIL. Students and staff are all asked to purchase a book to help the school to build its library. The day of the event, the books are available to be read and people do passage readings. As this is going on, students sell various Haitian delicacies, and particularly regional specialties.

Selling their wares 

Orpha with the collection of books 

I tried the specialty from Jeremie, called Tonm-Tonm. It was made by these hardworking ladies, who were beating up the root that makes the yellow stuff in the picture below.

This is the dish.

 My instructions were thus: “Cut off a bit of the yellow stuff, put some sauce on it, and swallow. DO NOT CHEW.”

First attempt at “just swallow”

After I got the hang of it, it was actually pretty delicious: the root that they ground has almost the texture of bread dough. Just another day of exploration. 

"Perhaps, Someday, We Will Look Back Upon These Things with Joy"

Last April, I got an e-mail that led my roommate Victoria to recite a rousing rendition of Dr. Seuss’s “Oh The Places You’ll Go:” I was accepted to YASC and was headed to Haiti in a few months. We were sitting with other good friends in Fordham’s Rose Garden, one of the most beautiful places in the world, in my humble opinion. The central feature of the garden is a fountain surrounded by a quote by Virgil: “Perhaps, someday, we will look back upon these things with joy.”

The family and me in front of the fountain on my graduation day. 

The fountain was installed while I was abroad in France to much uproar: students thought the quote was inaccurate. “This is college. It is fun now.” The quote always spoke to me, however. Late nights studying for genetics exams weren't always the most fun, but I joyfully remember my roommates dancing into the room with headlamps on to disrupt my studying. I remember 2 am pizza runs during finals or that feeling of achievement when I finally understood what Plato was saying.

Living in Haiti, I often remember that quote. When the person I want to meet with is 45 minutes late. When I am sweating profusely as I try to eat my lunch (Who serves soup when it is 95 degrees out? The answer is Haitians). When I think I cannot handle another white carbohydrate. When I am having one of those off days where my French suddenly makes me sound like an illiterate five year old or when I really wish that I got the joke at lunch. When it takes four hours to drive me the 26 miles from Port au Prince to Leogane. A thousand little daily inconveniences that make my life so deliciously different. A thousand little daily differences that make life a joy here.

In a little over a month, I will dive into a crazy, incredible, all consuming adventure as a medical student at Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, which will certainly be full of its fair share of late nights and will hopefully include some roommates who will dance with headlamps. But in these final few weeks, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the day to day things that yes, have made my life more difficult, but also less ordinary. That have put things into perspective for me. That have challenged me to think differently and act differently, walk differently and speak differently, to think differently and perceive differently.

No, it has not all been rainbows and butterflies. But in those storm clouds and baby tarantulas, there is a beautiful, well lived life that I am thrilled to have experienced. 

Some Photos

Happy Mango Season... 15 mangos for about $1.10!

Haitian Flag Day Celebration in May. The Haitian flag is a block of blue and a block of red with the Haitian seal in the middle (you can see a flag sticking out of my ponytail). This schema was made by taking the tricolor French flag (vertical blocks of Red, white, and Blue) and "ripping out the white man." We were off to a parade! 

Sunset is consistently gorgeous. But we can also talk about the trash pile... most garbage is burned in Haiti. 

Things that make you exactly as sweaty as you think that they would: ironing in the tropics. And as far as Haitians are concerned (and remembering that power is just a sometimes thing here) everything MUST be pressed. 

We have some beautiful flora

Me with some friends at a talent show/dance following the capping ceremony. Things that are cultural universals, it seems: photo shoots

At the end of May we took a field trip to the Haitian History Museum and Fort Jacques. Fort Jacques is located WAY up in the mountains. And it was rainy.  I WAS COLD. It was the strangest feeling in the world. It was also beautiful. I love how you can see the shape of Haiti from all the way up here (this looks out over Port au Prince) 

Umbrella selfies! 

A while back a visitor brought a bunch of balloons... it was an incredibly entertaining night. 

Welcome to OLTCH/New Vision Orphanage

Me, in my natural orphanage environment: covered in a pile of infants. 

There is an orphanage in Leogane where I sometimes like to go on the weekends. As far as orphanages in Haiti go, it is pretty spectacular. They had more formal buildings before the earthquake but lost them all (but saved all of the children). Now the kids are in plywood dorms. There are girls and boys dorms for each age group, in addition to a special needs room. Children range in age from 1 month to 18 years old. They recently combined with another orphanage (hence the double name) where the children were fed 1 or 2 times a day, slept 8 or 9 to a bed, and didn’t go to school. So what makes OLTCH so spectacular? Each child has a bed and three meals a day, for starters. They go to school (and are getting good grades!). The staff is generally caring and not in it for the money. These are not standards maintained by approximately 80% orphanages in Haiti. There are still problems: there aren’t enough toys, there aren’t enough role models, there aren’t enough people to pick up all the babies. But the kids are alive, fed, clean, and loved.

The baby house

 Many of these children still have parents but the parents do not have the means to support them. I cannot even imagine having to make the decision to give up my child so that they can have a better life than I could offer them. It tears me apart even though I know that, being an American, I would probably never be asked to make this decision. 

This is my little buddy. He is 4 months old and very serious, especially in his Polo shirt. His parents dropped him off when he was 2 days old. 

What strikes me about the orphanage every time I go is how normal it is. The kids run and play and enjoy themselves. They cause havoc and get in trouble and get really excited when someone will read them a book. They live a difficult life, but they are kids and they love bubbles and books and big bear hugs.

Happy guy! 

A new game entitled "Let me see how close I can get my tongue to your camera lens"

For more information and pictures, check out their website! http://oltch.org/

Mobile Clinic

I had the unique pleasure of working with a group of medical students and doctors from the University of Mississippi this week as they went out into rural areas in the Leogane area to provide care. I could talk about it for hours, but I will leave it to a few points.

Confession: This is actually a picture from a different trip, but just to give you a sense of what "rural" looks like 

I have learned a lot in a year here, though it is not necessarily the kinds of things you want to learn. I spent time sitting alongside of doctors as they assessed and treated patients. Sometimes, I was clueless. Sometimes, I was really thankful for my Physiology and Virology that made me sound like I sort of knew what I was talking about. And sometimes, well,  I was a rock star. But not in the way that you want to be a rock star. Turns out, after seeing enough cases of lymphatic filarisis walking around, you can diagnose elephantiasis on the spot and know right away that there is nothing you could do for them. I can diagnose severe malnutrition in an infant with a fever faster than a 4^th year med student (orange hair means that a black baby is so deprived of amino acids that their body has stopped making melanin). And mosquito-borne illnesses? Let me tell you about them. These are illnesses I will see rarely, if ever, in the USA but are incredibly common here. 

Malnutrition is heartbreaking. Let’s go back to this orange-haired infant. She comes in and she is one sick little baby. So we give her medicines and some vitamins but… it isn't going to be enough. You know this baby is going to just get sicker and sicker and there is nothing you can do. Mom doesn’t have money for food, there are 2 other kids at home, and we are highly suspicious that the mother is infected with HIV. So I do what any other else would do: I search around to see what leftovers from lunch we can offer them. Someone finds a container of baby food to give to the mother. But really, what does that PB&J sandwich mean a week from now? How about in a month when the children’s vitamins run out? I did what I could do in the day we saw them, sending them off with toothbrushes and soap and sandwiches and medicines, but I just can’t get this family out of my head. Lottery of birth put us on opposite sides of the table and I would hope that if roles were reversed, she would be having the same thoughts.

Chronic diseases are still chronic, even if we can hand you a month of pills. “Ma’am, has anyone ever told you you have dangerously high blood pressure?” “Yes, I had some pills that the last group gave me but I ran out a couple of months ago.” Medical missions are desperately needed in Haiti and fill a gap in rural and desperately poor areas that the Haitian medical system cannot handle. Still, the gaps remain. Limited supplies mean each person gets a 30 day supply and then these people are out of luck if they cannot afford more medication to carry them between groups. There are some groups that work in conjunction with the nursing school to address this gap: they hire a nurse to go to where they held their clinics on a monthly basis to manage long term care, but this is not an option for all groups.   

Haiti has hooked me. As I walk through my final 5 weeks on this little island, I am immensely and continually happy about its geographic location. I have a privilege that many of my fellow YASCers do not have: the ability to have a long and intimate relationship with this country. Throughout the week, I found myself making notes for when I am back, leading medical groups. Nursing student friends talk about the rural places they want to go and work with me as a physician in the years to come. Someone said to me once that Haiti gets under your skin and you can never truly let go of it once you get infected. But I think it has also gotten into my heart. And I am so incredibly happy that this relationship does not end in a little over a month, but can continue on.