Day Two - Megan and Rachel

Yesterday Rachel and I were sent back to Sean Penn's Petionville Club camp. Our ride leaves at 8:30 while everyone else's seems to leave at 7, so we get to sit around and blog in the mornings. Or, I do, while Rachel unpacks, repacks, and double repacks everything she's bringing. Not that I'm complaining -- it's her insanity that has made much of our progress possible over the last few days.

There are two tents at Petionville Camp. One is a triage tent, the other is a hospital tent. Until yesterday there were EMTs at the triage tent, writing down complaints of patients, maybe taking a vital sign or two, and sending them up to the hospital tent. The hospital staff, then, had to see basically every patient that showed up (and that's a lot, a LOT -- over 100 a day.)

Rachel had decided to spend part of the day on Monday down there, and she did so well keeping patients out of the hospital that they decided to assign us both down there yesterday. We came prepared -- medicines in pre-divided baggies, otoscopes, thermometers, everything we needed right there. We treated anyone who wasn't actually sick, and everyone else went to the hospital tent. I think I sent 4 or 5 patients up there the whole day. We think we saw 60 people between the two of us. It was such a fulfilling day -- I felt like a fish in water rather than floundering. I had everything I needed right at my fingertips and I wasn't wandering around a strange place trying to find medicines. It was really great.

We did such a good job that they begged us to come back today, and so we are headed there. We even got T-shirts that designate us as J/P HRO volunteers (Jenkins/Penn Haiti Relief Organization). Rachel has her sleeves cut off and I left my T shirt under a table in the hospital. Sigh.

There is some frustration, for sure. Sean Penn is having to relocate all of these people in the next few weeks to a location about 1 1/2 hours away. The owner of the golf club where the people all live wants his golf course back (!) and so these people are all having to move out of town where they will be even more isolated than they already are. They're moving 7,000 people this week alone. So there was a bus full of people ready to go, and Sean Penn was having a fit because there were supposed to be two doctors on the bus, and they weren't, and so some Haitian guy showed up at the tent where I was sitting and asked me to follow him quickly. Of course I thought there was some emergency at the hospital but he took me through the hospital and face to face with Sean Penn (I guess the guy thought any doctor would do.) Sean Penn looked at me, scowled, and said, "You don't even have a kit, you're not ready to go on the bus." I said, "I don't know anything about that, I'm just a volunteer down in the triage tent." He shooed me away with a "Thank you."

So yeah. Sean Penn yelled at me. I love it.

Cases we saw today -- babies with scabies (that rhymes!), back pain, headaches, indigestion, itchy eyes, vaginal infections, skin infections, sleeplessness, hypertension, wound care, fever, dehydration, asthma. Everyone is suffering from PTSD and they have somatic signs of acute stress. Vitamins and ibuprofen and benadryl make everything better, really.

A lot of these people seem to have no idea what normal body function is, and so they come to see me, waiting five hours in the heat to have me tell them that actually, pelvic floor pressure when you are 8 months pregnant is perfectly normal, here's some Tylenol, thank you goodbye.

Last night when we returned from Petionville (did I mention we work from 8:30-3:30?) our friend Justine met us here to invite us to dinner. We were asked to bring some vinegar so we actually took a walk to the grocery store first. There is a guy with a very large shotgun guarding the entrance to the store, and we realized upon entering that Haitians must LOVE to eat goat because we saw every kind of goat meat (including heads) for sale there.

We had a fabulous meal cooked by a German named Oliver -- tomato soup with basil, salad with Rachel's raspberry balsamic vinaigrette, and pasta with red sauce, bacon, and basil. Yum. It was served three hours later than the original invite, so we were dead on our feet when we got back to Quisqueya last night. Therefore, no blog until this morning.

More posting tonight or tomorrow!

Megan