Haiti: Round 2

After this trip, I remembered why I had wanted to come back to Haiti. With trip date changes and difficulty recruiting doctors and students to go on a Thanksgiving medical trip to Haiti, there had been times of hesitation about continuing, but I'm so glad we didn't give up on this trip. The core team consisting of 8 students, 2 physicians, and 2 translators worked so well together and alongside the Haitian doctors and translators. We were able to support Project Medishare in their role in the community through mobile clinics, and were even able to help a few patients with emergency transportation to the nearest hospital. We also learned a lot. We learned about the Haitian people, their community, their schools, their sources of food and water, their way of living. We learned about the limits of rural/mobile medicine. We learned about how Medishare works to further its health goals for Haiti under the Ministry of the Health. Trip highlights included:

1. "Continuity of care" 
1. our pediatrician seeing a family she had seen the year before
2. seeing a child,  from the year before, with a cleft lip and palate still surviving
3. seeing patients' charts filled with the last few years of health visits 
2. Making a difference  
1. Being able to provide emergency transportation to the hospital for a man with CHF exacerbation, a women going into labor, and a young man with a dangerous eye infection 
2. Making the diagnosis of cervical cancer in a patient in clinic and being able to give her referral to a hospital for treatment
3. Having one of our trip leaders, Bryan, help teach and English class to local Haitians 
4. Being serenaded by the "Troubadour of Thomonde" and experiencing other local flavor
5. Seeing the incredible amount of joy provided to a group of school children when provided with something as a simple as a small soccer ball by one of our translators, Mason.

All in all, it was a great trip to Haiti. We arrived there and back home in one piece, we helped patients, we helped Medishare, we learned a lot, and we had fun doing it all.