Medical clinics

I haven’t updated in a while so I will go over what has been going on. Kim and Kristal went back to the states yesterday. Brian drove them to Port on Tuesday and Kim is hard at work today in Arizona. While they were here we did medical clinics each day. We were in the Jubilee neighborhood specifically the building where the feeding program takes place. Kim again did a great job testing kids and doing exams. She was retesting the children for anemia. While most were anemic by American standards some showed improvements and others were more anemic. The lowest I remember was a pregnant lady with iron at 3.4. Ken did a great job of tracking kids down from around the neighborhood. With the help of David (Haitian) he went on a picture scavenger hunt for all the kids that had been tested in the past by the clinics in February and then again this summer. Brian did the translating. I will highlight a few of the highlights and lowlights of the clinics. Highlight is Kim’s heart for the Haitian people no matter how tired the rest of us got she was always willing to look at the last person that shoved, pushed, begged, lied about the severity of their illness to get in to see the doc. She was extremely gracious and professional. The kids did a good job of being stoic when they knew they were going to be pricked in the finger to draw a drop of blood. There were only 20-30 kids that were crying badly in anticipation of the prick. One of the sadder events was testing people for HIV. There was a girl that who was tested that was super thin and sick often. I think she was between 14 and 18. Her arms were not thicker than my wrists. We tested her blood and she was positive for HIV. It breaks my heart to tell someone that they are sick and are expected to die because of their illness. There was the occasional kid that wanted to show how tough he was by not flinching. Besides the medical clinics Kim did a few house visits and saw some patients at the pastor’s house. There were also people that came to the house when they heard there was a doctor in town. The hardest patient for me was a lady that had breast cancer. The cancer was so for advanced you could visibly see the cancer tumor. Kim diagnosed her with two months to live. We saw her two days ago and she came back today to see if there was anything we could do to help. And there was nothing. She was coming to us for some type of hope and there was nothing we could do. It was rough to see the lady walk away across the dirt landscape towards the mud huts some with tin roofs some with thatch roofs. In her shoulders you could tell she knew she was dying. A life of hopelessness ending as she walks away alone to her dirt floor home to die a painful death.

Dave