Happiness is ...

Yesterday morning Frantz T., age 7  came to the clinic with lots of smiles.  Last week he had surgery to have an umbilical hernia repaired and returned to have his bandage removed and a check up.   His mother told us ''I'm very happy that Visitation Clinic with the help of the Americans realized the surgery for my child, I did not like his big belly and I was not able to afford the surgery in Port-au-Prince. '' 

Even minor surgeries like this can have a big impact on a child's well being and how they are treated by their friends and the community.  Our visiting Mercy Medical Care team performed 15 procedures last week.  They also identified another 60 children who need surgery, some of it major.  We are working with them to schedule a return in April.  We are also developing plans for a clinic expansion to accommodate more frequent surgical teams.  There is an acute shortage of hospitals and clinics with surgical capacity in Haiti.  Your support HERE can help us fix this. 

Maryland Team - Last Day

 On the last day of the mobile clinic, the team hiked up the mountains to visit the town of Sillegue.  This is one of Haiti's many isolated villages that have little access to medical care unless they walk several hours to a clinic such as ours.  

Children attend the open air school (right) which became the clinic for the day.  The mobile team saw about 150 children and babies.  They treated more cases of scabies and identified three more children who require surgery.  

The team back-packed their supplies, equipment and meds.  But lunch was more readily available as shown here.

Maryland Team: Days 3 & 4.

Hosting visiting medical teams is one of the many services that Visitation Clinic brings to rural Haiti.  These teams can provide the resources to stage mobile clinics in schools and distant villages.  These mobile teams can provide general heath screening for a good many people and identify those who need care at the main clinic.  This week, the team from Maryland has done this exceedingly well.  Here is what Dr. Karen emailed us today:

All is going well...
Thus far we have eval approx 1700 children in 6 schools ...today the team is going to a far away village...taking the bus part way and then hiking the rest...expected to be a 90 min walk ...they are excited!

Meanwhile, the surgical part of their team has completed 11 operations, with another five scheduled for today.  This week they have had to perform these surgeries at an overcrowded and poorly equipped government hospital located in the nearest city.  Because of these conditions, there are another fifty children who need surgery, but won't be helped.  Next year, we are hoping, will be quite different.  We hope to have made some modifications to our clinic that will allow  for  basic surgeries.  You can support this effort by donating HERE

Maryland Team: Day 2

Today our volunteer medical team visited two more schools and screened another 700 students.  A common disease that they are finding and treating is a skin rash known as scabies that is spread by a small mite.  About 10% of the children have this.  More serious is that a few children in each school need surgical intervention for conditions ranging from hernias to heart problems.  Fortunately, the visiting team has a pediatric surgeon with them and they are attempting to treat some of these children in a nearby hospital.  This is difficult for many reasons ranging from the lack of space and resources to bureaucratic issues.  Nonetheless, today they were able to treat two children today who needed minor surgery (photo below).

Maryland Medical Team

This week the clinic is honored to host a large medical team who are associated with Johns Hopkins University and the Mercy Medical Mission.  Lead by Dr./Sr. Karen Schneider, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and a Sister of Mercy, the group will be focusing on the children that live in the region served by Visitation Clinic.  They arrived late Sunday afternoon and wasted no time getting to work.   On Monday evening Dr. Karen sent us this email.

"Today we went to C.E.S.A and saw 740 primary school children. We found 20 who need surgery that we can do this week and the teachers are trying to get the message to the families. We found 2 with bad hearts and 1 who has knocked knees and needs orthopedic surgery. Dr JF told me about 5 other children with heart problems and I am working on getting them to USA for surgery."

Our administrator sent us these photos by separate email.

Earthquake - Two Year's Later



The Port-au-Prince Cathedral

Two years ago Haiti was jarred by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.  It's zone of  destruction included the most heavily populated region of Haiti.  Much of Haiti's infrastructure was destroyed including half of its hospitals, almost all it's government buildings and some of it's oldest and most cherished structures from the Presidential Palace to the Cathedral.  The number of people killed will probably never be known, but in loss of life, it is being listed as one of history's ten worst natural disasters.

In general, developing countries suffer the most from natural disasters.  Building construction is often inadequate with little oversight from the government.  For instance, before 2011 a Haitian builder couldn't even find seismic data for designing properly.  There were no building codes or city planning for guidance.  Consequently, poor construction was common and not only did countless homes collapse in the earthquake, but so did schools, banks, hospitals, the UN headquarters and the prestigious Montana Hotel.  Tragically, some of Haiti's most dedicated and promising leaders were lost, including all but one student of Haiti's State University nursing class. 

Visitation Clinic is 43 miles west of the quake epicenter.  At that distance, the surface ground movement had lessened and we sustained little damage from the quake.   Some nearby houses did colapse, but no one nearby was killed.  We were very fortunate.

Disasters can have beneficial consequences if we learn from them.  We can dedicate ourselves to those who were lost and resolve that the disaster not be repeated.  Both Haitian government and international groups are taking steps in this direction.  Now, for the first time, the USGS has created seismic risk maps for Haiti.  The Haitian government has stepped up and authorized interim building codes that use the USGS data.  Engineering groups have completed an analysis of why certain building's failed in the earthquake.  And we at VHF are in the middle of a major project of planning how we should expand our services while insuring that our buildings will survive the next earthquake.  We now know that the ten-year likelihood of another major earthquake is 1 in 6, and that the fault-line is only 9 miles south of our clinic. We've recently engaged civil engineers to analyze our present buildings and recommend any retrofitting.   

The 2010 earthquake was a horrific event. The loss of life was tragic and unnecessarily high. If there is one positive outcome, it is the new realization of the need for seismic building practices. There will be more earthquakes in Haiti. There need not be the loss of so many lives.