Christ’s love buoys busy Haitian clinic

By Meredith Barkley

October 2008 -- Our medical clinic opened on a bright Monday morning high in the rugged mountains of southern Haiti.

Patients began arriving in the community of Fondwa well before dawn. Many had walked miles over the steep terrain. One 82-year-old woman with high blood pressure and body aches had gotten up at 3 a.m. and walked three hours. She, like the rest, was eager to see a doctor.

By 8:30 there was chaos. Several hundred people jammed onto the veranda in front of the locked clinic door. They hollered at each other and struggled to move in closer.

We tried to push through so we could get inside and set up. No luck. Finally one of the Haitians stepped in front of us and took control. He yelled over the din, ordering people aside long enough for us to squeeze through.

Our Westminster group was in Haiti working with Family Health Ministries of Durham.

Once inside, it didn’t take long to prepare for patients. A steady stream flowed through the cramped, noisy space all day. Through translators, each person told what ailed them. Medical team members then assigned them a doctor or nurse practitioner.

Patients complained of body pain, flu, blood pressure problems, diabetes, malaria. Many of the children had worms and scabies.

Treatment for most problems was routine — pills for pain, ointments for skin problems. But some patients arrived with problems serious enough that they’d have been sent to a hospital had they arrived at a doctor’s office in Greensboro.

A doctor treated a baby girl daily for third-degree burns that she’d received after falling into an open cooking fire. Another team member stitched up a 13-year-old boy who arrived with a machete cut.

One boy had an insect bite that had infected his entire leg. His parents were dispatched to a nearby city to buy a tetanus shot and bring it back to be administered. Doctors and nurses saw a number of patients who needed tetanus shots. None were available at the clinic.

David Bouska, a Greensboro family practice doctor, recalled how sad one father became when Bouska had to tell him there was no cure for his beautiful daughter’s sudden deafness and loss of speech.

One mother brought in her starving newborn. The mother’s breast milk had dried up, and she had nothing to feed her baby. A team member gave her infant formula collected by Westminster and instructed her how to use it and nurse her baby back to health.

The infant formula and peanut butter sent down by Westminster is being used in Fondwa’s infant nutrition program. That program is a lifeline for many children and their mothers in the community. Every child who came to the clinic got vitamins, some of which were also provided by Westminster.

The people in these mountains were hard hit by this summer’s storms. While the four storms that swept across Haiti in less than a month did more damage in other parts of the country, Fondwa-area residents lost precious gardens, livestock and fruit trees.

All that has made day-to-day life here more tenuous. Many were barely getting by as it was. Characteristically, though, the Haitians aren’t offering up excuses. They’re working harder to provide for their families. Our team helped them a little.

That team included Bouska, Butch Sherrill, Denise Estridge, Wally and Nancy Fox, Julie Long, Lisa Pierzchala, Mary and Roger Hartsell, Caryl Johnson, Mary Burritt and Maureen and Meredith Barkley. Kathy Walmer, Family Health Ministries executive director, led the trip.

The team, with help from Haitian translators, took each patient’s vital signs, jotted down their complaints, and assigned them a doctor or nurse practitioner, who treated them. Team members also manned a small laboratory to process medical tests and dispensed medicine from the pharmacy. One team member, Mary Burritt, directed the clinic’s flow so it ran as efficiently as possible.

We saw 700 patients during the clinic’s four days. We exhausted the supplies of antibiotics, Tylenol, ibuprofen and blood pressure medicine that we brought. We handed out lots of vitamins. And we handed out smiles and words of encouragement — to the Haitians and to our teammates.

One on the team got very sick during the trip, and others pitched in to nurse her back to health. When people’s hearts ached at what they saw, team members cheered them up. They sang to the babies and taught the Catholic nuns to give soy milk to a colicky baby.

They showed Christ’s love in a very poor place.