The week in LaColline passed quickly. Though the clinic wasn’t terribly busy we saw some very sick patients and, I’d like to think, did some good. Between patients there was time for us to do a little teaching. Lissa asked me to explain antibodies. After I did she asked, “So why do we need antibiotics when we have antibodies?” A good question indeed.
On Friday we returned to Léogâne and joined the rest of the team for the daily mobile clinics. This was the routine: After breakfast we helped load up the Land Cruiser with supplies and drove out into the countryside. No matter where we were headed we soon left the paved road and bounced along rutty dirt tracks flanked by scrappy fields of sugar cane, banana and cassava. Beyond the fields, brown and green hills rose up to kiss the clouds. Periodically, the idyll was broken by reminders of why we were here: out of nowhere we’d pass a tight collection of tarp tents, ten or a hundred, jammed together in a field that should have been planted with crops. Then, in a sobering echo, we’d come to a collection of destroyed houses as if they’d been smashed by a giant fist.
One day we went
to a tiny village called Duplaisir. Gilles, the driver, drove the Land Cruiser down the steep dirt road to a shallow river. But instead of fording across, he suddenly turned right—we were driving upstream! Gilles explained that as long as the previous evening’s rains hadn’t been too heavy this semi-aquatic route was the best way to get to Duplaisir. Around a bend we came to the village bath tub: people of all ages were soaping themselves in the brown water. A little further on was the Laundromat, with clothes being pounded clean on the rocks and put out to dry on fallen tree limbs. Around another bend was the local bike and motorcycle wash. Though I felt quite conspicuous in a huge vehicle lumbering up a muddy river bed, people barely looked up. And when Gilles beeped, they only grudgingly moved aside to let us pass.When we arrived at a village we usually set up under the shade of a big mango tree. So
metimes the villagers produced fancy dining room chairs for us to sit on at our folding tables, sometimes crude handmade ones. Usually the scattered concrete houses were no longer fit to be occupied—their rubbled remains seemed to have only two uses: a place on which to drape clothes to dry, and a playground for frisking goats. As the word got around that “American doctors” were having a clinic, people streamed in. Skin infections were common. There were fevers, diarrhea, pneumonia, high blood pressure, tooth aches and worms. Lots of men had hernias and lots of women had sexually-transmitted diseases. Many complained of poor vision. And the majority also had headaches and stomach aches, very often originating just after the earthquake.Some patients
were quite spunky. I shook the hand of a seventy year-old women and asked her what her problem was. “I’m not telling you, doctor” she said with a twinkle in her eye, “it’s up to you to figure it out!” A young woman sat down in the chair next to me, crossed her arms, and announced “If you aren’t going to give me some medicine, I‘m going to leave now!” I told another women, who had a sexually-transmitted disease, that the antibiotics I was giving her would treat her infection. But to be sure she was healed and wouldn’t pass the infection on, she must not have sex for a week. My translator, Whistler, gave her this instruction. She said something back to him and they both burst into hysterics. I asked to be let in on the joke. Whistler dried his eyes and said, “She said she was going to tell her husband that the doctor said she couldn’t have sex for a month.”
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