It rained like crazy last night, so the travel up the mountain was a little more interesting than the previous two trips this week. Our big truck fish tailed at one point, so we all moved to the back of the truck to have more weight on the back wheels. That was a little scary. Some people had to got out of the little truck and walked the rest of the way up the mountain - Leslie, Daphne, Julia, and Alex proved that they are the fittest of the group!
A large group was awaiting us when we finally arrived. Since our patients this day come from farther up the mountain and walk up to 4 hours one way to reach us, I always am a little embarrased that they arrive before we do. As in the previous visits, we found our patients today to be in relatively poorer health than those from the less remote areas the prior days. One of the most frustrating things about our trips is that no matter how carefully we plan, we always seem to run out of meds on the third day. Today was no different. This meant that our docs had to be a little creative with their prescriptions towards the end of the day. Despite this, everyone left with meds to treat their particular symptoms.
One of the things that we noticed this trip was the markedly decreased incidence of std's. Of course, we attribute this to the fact that people are now getting treatment and, therefore, are less likely to continue spreading the diseases throughout their communities. The many condoms we distributed probably helped quite a bit, also!
We saw more than 250 patients today. By 3:00, I think we were all ready to see the last patients, but they just kept coming! Our dentist saw about 18 patients. At one point, he had 8 people waiting for treatment. Unfortunately, we ran out of the cloth medicine bags, so the last several patients had to be content with gallon size zip lock bags. I hated that since everyone loves the colorful bags.
Our patient who presented Daphne with the sweet potatoes yesterday, returned today with avocados from her tree. Madame Anastasia also returned with avocados and pumpkins for us. The generosity of people who have so little material things is overwhelming.
Before we left, we presented the many dresses which the Christ Church sewing group had made, and the t-shirts which many people had purchased for the boys at the school. Hopefully, on our next trip, we will see some of them being worn.
We said good-bye to our translators and nursing students today. One of our translators, Peterson, is quite the entrepreneur, and sells Haitian crafts. Many of us bought jewelry, wood work, and paintings from him. Our friend, Mario, another person who works at the hospital, sells Haitan vanilla. He came around when we returned today, also, So, of course, we supported his enterprise, as well.
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