Hello Everyone,
Sorry for the delayed post! It's been a busy week and it has taken me a little while to recover from hosting the team in northern Haiti. As my first team, it was a pretty demanding trip with a steep learning curve. I forgot what it was like to be a first-timer in Haiti, and let me tell you in can be a pretty rough experience. The team I was hosting consisted of a retired peds surgeon, a nurse prof, and an ER nurse. Their purpose was to do an assessment of the hospital, Beraca Medical Center, which is an extremely difficult task coming from the US healthcare system. All you tend to see is problems, and usually fail to fully grasp the context of the medical care provided here. When resources are as low as they are here, you work with what you got.
The physicians and staff at Beraca are a pretty inspiring crew: their operating budget consists almost entirely of patient fees. Think about this for a second. Try to imagine running a hospital based on fees paid by individuals who make less than $2 dollars a day in income. And we think we have insurance problems! MTI's goals in Haiti are sustainable development, but such a low resource reality makes you wonder how much a "sustainable" and non-dependent hospital will be able to do for patients without drastic economic development in the country. I've always been attracted to medicine because I thought it was a straight-forward way to serve and prevent suffering in developing countries, but the more time I spend in Haiti the more value I see in non-medical development as well.
In regards to patient care, our time at Beraca was a good reminder not so much of the unique diseases that Haitians face, but the difficulty they also have in treating the illnesses we struggle with in the US. We lost a 4 day old newborn to cancer (renal/adrenal neuroblastoma), a little baby girl who had one of the largest masses our surgeon had ever seen in a neonate. In the hospital was also a 13 yo boy with epilepsy who had seized, fallen into a cooking fire, and received a 3rd degree burn on 20% of his body. (The photo below is quite gruesome so only look if you have the stomach for it.) The team really wanted to transfer the boy to a hospital where he could receive a series of skin graphs, but the family opted not to travel because of a lack of support in Port au Prince and other family reasons. MTI worked to arrange logistics and treatment in Port au Prince so hopefully they will be able to travel soon so the boy can be operated on.
Anyway, enough blabbering for now. The next post will be much more timely and straight forward.
Before I go I would like to ask for prayers for my friend and co-worker Wilson who had a college friend pass away in child-birth this last week. The suffering in Haiti comes at you from all angles.
Blessings to you
Sorry for the delayed post! It's been a busy week and it has taken me a little while to recover from hosting the team in northern Haiti. As my first team, it was a pretty demanding trip with a steep learning curve. I forgot what it was like to be a first-timer in Haiti, and let me tell you in can be a pretty rough experience. The team I was hosting consisted of a retired peds surgeon, a nurse prof, and an ER nurse. Their purpose was to do an assessment of the hospital, Beraca Medical Center, which is an extremely difficult task coming from the US healthcare system. All you tend to see is problems, and usually fail to fully grasp the context of the medical care provided here. When resources are as low as they are here, you work with what you got.
The physicians and staff at Beraca are a pretty inspiring crew: their operating budget consists almost entirely of patient fees. Think about this for a second. Try to imagine running a hospital based on fees paid by individuals who make less than $2 dollars a day in income. And we think we have insurance problems! MTI's goals in Haiti are sustainable development, but such a low resource reality makes you wonder how much a "sustainable" and non-dependent hospital will be able to do for patients without drastic economic development in the country. I've always been attracted to medicine because I thought it was a straight-forward way to serve and prevent suffering in developing countries, but the more time I spend in Haiti the more value I see in non-medical development as well.
In regards to patient care, our time at Beraca was a good reminder not so much of the unique diseases that Haitians face, but the difficulty they also have in treating the illnesses we struggle with in the US. We lost a 4 day old newborn to cancer (renal/adrenal neuroblastoma), a little baby girl who had one of the largest masses our surgeon had ever seen in a neonate. In the hospital was also a 13 yo boy with epilepsy who had seized, fallen into a cooking fire, and received a 3rd degree burn on 20% of his body. (The photo below is quite gruesome so only look if you have the stomach for it.) The team really wanted to transfer the boy to a hospital where he could receive a series of skin graphs, but the family opted not to travel because of a lack of support in Port au Prince and other family reasons. MTI worked to arrange logistics and treatment in Port au Prince so hopefully they will be able to travel soon so the boy can be operated on.
Anyway, enough blabbering for now. The next post will be much more timely and straight forward.
Before I go I would like to ask for prayers for my friend and co-worker Wilson who had a college friend pass away in child-birth this last week. The suffering in Haiti comes at you from all angles.
Blessings to you
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| Valmy, our 13 yo burn victim with his mom. |
Keep on my friend! Glad you're there and thanks for the post!
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