Camp Quisqueya

Hello all,

For the past few days I've been wanting to write about Quisqueya. We are living in a school complex with several 2 story structures that survived the earthquake MUCH better than most. The medical volunteers are housed in tents on the grounds or in classrooms. We totally lucked out and got the Broadmoor of rooms - it used to be the staff lounge and actually has an air conditioner and its own bathroom. This is a serious luxury. Within the room, we have all the supplies we brought plus our mattresses. It gets a little crowded but we have done a pretty good job of sharing and luckily nobody snores!

For food, Quisqueya provides 2 meals per day. Breakfast is bread pastries and some fruit. Dinner is rice with beans and some type of chicken with sauce. It doesn't vary much but it's filling and no-one has gotten sick. They have plenty of fresh water in water coolers. We can also walk up to the grocery store (Megan wrote about our adventure there) and get a surprising amount of comfort food there (after you go past the armed guards at the door).

The Quisqueya staff does the logistics, decides where to send each individual (the PT's go to the hospitals where many of the amputees and post-surgical patients are, and Megan, Lisa and I usually go to tent cities for primary care), and arrange transport. The staff is amazingly responsive about meeting our requests and answering a never-ending sequence of stupid questions.

Here are some profiles of the staff we have been working with:

Art was the PE and Health teacher at Quisqueya school before the earthquake. Since then, he's been king of arranging transport and helping folks with all sorts of minutae. He is a corn-fed midwestern guy in his late 20's with a lot of positive energy. He is also a great soccer player, and arranges games daily with school staff, Haitian workers, US army guys and volunteers all playing.

Miquette is a phenomenally beautiful and poised Haitian who was the school nurse and biology teacher before the quake. She does all the detail work for staffing and supplying outlying clinics and hospital - she also arranges small daily miracles - like getting tetanus toxoid to a village 4 hours out of Port-au-Prince for a child who would have died without it. If we see someone in a camp who needs emergent transport to a hospital, we call Miquette. She also raises money by having her students make jewelry to sell at the school. She and Art are a very cute couple.

Jamie Cartwright is an American citizen of Haitian descent, speaks English, French and Creole with complete fluency, and is actually a classically trained Mezzo Soprano opera singer. She was in the US starting her Master's degree in music when the earthquake happened. She was on a plane the next day and worked with Miquette on the streets, doing first aid, transporting people to hospitals, aiding in emergency surgeries. Since then she has been the contact for groups coming and going from the U.S. She provided us with fantastic information before the trip and has been doing all the statistics for Quisqueya organization and for the health ministry as we come in. She is incredibly intelligent and well spoken, and has given us a lot of insight about the depths of the problems in Haiti - political, educational, ecological, judicial... Since the earthquake, Jamie has found a mission to study medicine and is hoping to become enrolled in an intensive Wilderness First Provider / Paramedic program in the United States. After completing the program, she will come back and be able to be a provider in the camps. She is really an amazing person. If anyone reading this wants to help Haiti, PLEASE consider donating to our blog site so we can help Jamie with her education - this will be a ripple effect. By helping her, she will help hundreds and hundreds of people who have more needs than you can even imagine.

There are more folks that I'll describe later. All of them act as camp counsellors for the crazy crews that come and go, a week or a month at a time, with different staffs every day. It is a lot like camp here, fun, social, with lots of camaraderie. Except the food is always the same... and the showers are outside... and you can't drink the water... and there is a big wall around the compound with razor wire... and you can get scabies or malaria... and there are big rats (luckily we haven't actually seen any)....and all the campers are wearing scrubs and trying to score anti-fungal creams... and camp activities are a little unorthodox...

More later, and thanks for all your comments and support. Love, Rachel