HAITI: Day 7 -- PIH and some R&R

06-25-11

We packed up said goodbye to our modest little home of the last week and headed back to Port au Prince for a day of rest and relaxation with a stop at Partners in Health (PIH) along the way. When you enter the gates of PIH, you feel as if you’re entering a major compound. The driveway winds up to rows of concrete buildings. Some of the buildings serving as the hospital, others as homes for the patients, and other as community centers where women are taught skills to start local businesses. One of the community healthcare workers started us off on a walking tour of the outside of the compound.

At one point, we ran into a little boy who called himself Anyo. As he saw me, he asked me “Kreole? English?,” and I tried to explain to him that I only spoke a little Kreole…could he speak English? He told me yes and then proceeded to tell me “My name is Anyo” in perfect English. He was so friendly and outgoing, and the first child I met that could speak any English.

As we continued the tour of the compound, spiraling higher and higher (the compound is built on a mountain/hill), the views kept getting more and more beautiful. We finally reached the peak where you could see “mountains beyond mountains” (the appropriate name of the book about Paul Farmer and PIH in Haiti). After enjoying the view, we headed back down to tour parts of the hospital. We toured the internal medicine ward, the surgery ward, the maternity ward, and the TB ward. By “toured” I mean we would go to the entrance of the ward and a hospital worker would tell us some facts about the logistics of that specific ward. It was interesting to see in the maternity ward, posters of the treatment protocol for raped women as well as promotional material for the contraceptive injection. The hospital is the best medical facility I have seen in Haiti, and overall, PIH impressed me.

After a very bumpy (think huge potholes and crazy,/no rules, traffic), we arrived to our hotel in Port au Prince—Karibe. It was such a strange feeling going from working in makeshift clinics in the dirt where finding clean water was a huge problem to a five star hotel with a massive pool containing a built in bar. It very much typified the contrasts of Haiti—the huge disparity between the wealthy and the poor, the beautiful scenery dotted with makeshift shacks for housing, the smiling baby covered with a festering skin infection.

We enjoyed our time at the hotel, taking advantage of the pool and everything else the hotel had to offer—a celebratory ending of our trip to Haiti.

Overall, I enjoyed my trip to Haiti. It was fulfilling, frustrating, heart breaking, heartwarming, educational, and incredibly fun. The country has countless problems, but the people are resilient, and that gives me hope.