Love in the Time of Cholera

“I also expected a little more blogging from you especially when you live in a country ravaged by cholera.”

OK, so if you’re reading this blog it’s fairly likely that, similar to the distressed reader above, you’ve heard or read that this country is in the grip of a serious disease, and you may even want to know what things are like here.  I can’t comment on the national mobilization of clinics or treatment centers any better than, say, you’re preferred source of world news.  I have witnessed the anxiety running through the aid workers here and observed a spike in sales of the medical products sold out of burlap bags in taptaps.  I’ve also seen a few instructional signs put up outside a few of the tent camps to make people aware of preventative steps.  All in all, though, I really just know what I see or hear in bits and pieces.  

The most intimate experience I’ve had with cholera thus far has been in working two weekends back at a clinic set up for patients stricken with the evil disease*.  Since, the clinic has doubled the number of beds to prepare for a possible swell of patients, although the number of sick people remains almost the same.  The pharmacy is housed in a mid-sized tent, the hospital’s manager is an emergency volunteer from the States, and the medical technicians are many of the young people asking for help from the KCH program looking to help out and make a little money.  Like most everything in Haiti, it is a tad makeshift but 100% genuine in its desire and effort to help people survive.

I had the good fortune, the weekend I was there, to not have to share in the experience of losing a patient.  If I had, I would have witnessed the ordeal that clinics like this in Port au Prince are currently going through: independent body disposal – the morgue isn’t taking any more bodies to combat the virus.   Luckily, this was not in the cards. Here’s what was (switching to present tense):

It’s 85 degrees in the shade, hot water seeps out of the faucets of the donated military sinks that bear the distinctive smell of surgical antiseptic, and a nervous silence sits in the hospital air.  The two big white UNICEF tents closest to the clinic’s entrance are full of babies and young children, whose sporadic crying bouts give voice to the ethos that the adults can’t or won’t vocalize in the same uncontrollable way.  But mostly, even the children can’t find the energy to shed their tears.  I’ve never seen so many completely exhausted people in one place at one time.  To speak is sometimes a monumental task for the patients.

One of the more mundane tasks I am asked to do is make and deliver the oral rehydration serum that is used to quickly replace needed fluids in patients;  it’s like Gatorade on steroids.  Soon the patients or the visitors sitting next to their beds take to snapping playfully at me to run and get them some more.  I have become a faithful errand boy.

It’s quite a sight to see the parents who will never leave their children from the time they enter the hospital to the time they leave, spending 48 hours straight in a sticky tent.  Between tending for their children or attending to their own needs, they’ll pause to throw a few words in broken English at the foreign volunteers – “good work”, “more serum”, “thank you”.  Over the course of the weekend, I had a bunch of these little interactions, but two stood out especially.

Before I left on Sunday night, dark had fallen and we’d run out of serum in several of the tents, so I started to make a few big batches for the upcoming hours.  As I went about the repetitive process, dumping bags of water and packets of serum into 5 gallon tanks, a little woman walked up and asked me for serum; she wanted to take a little home for her other two children in the neighborhood, just to be safe.  “It’s not for me,” she told me in Kreyol, “but for my children.  They may not have the ability to see a doctor, and me too, but I have faith.  My only doctor is Good God, for he tends to everything.  What may come in this life will come, but God will tend to me.”  The ability of seemingly every Haitian person to conjure up a piece of divinely-inspired wisdom at the snap of a finger is one of the great gifts that the people here have; it’s what happens when, even if 50% of the population is illiterate, innumerous proverbs of Biblical and African origins are printed on public transit vehicles and faithfully recited to every child.

The second of these brief interactions was far less touching but equally as memorable.  As I was doing a round to check for who needed more serum, one man stopped me, holding his hand out longingly.  “Tttt….taaa,” he said, struggling to get out more than a syllable.  “What – what is it?” I asked, sitting down next to his bed. “Taaa, ttaaammmmp, Tampico,” he stuttered.  “I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”  With hardly any energy to speak, when just hours before he was nearly dead, he was begging me for the Haitian version of Sunny Delight (with about 50 additional grams of sugar). And that, ladies and gentlemen, is evidence of true love in the time of Cholera. I gave have him a big bottle of serum and the assurance that, really, this was better.

M’ap Gade Sel Bondieu (I’m watching only God)

*Cholera is a bacterial infection; in layman’s terms (because that’s all I know), the bacteria survives the journey through one’s digestive system, and, basically, chows down on the intestinal track until it causes, through a delightful combination of vomiting and diarrhea, the loss of all the fluids in the body... So "evil" seems like an appropriate adjective.