Miscellaneous

Last month Ambassadeurs Medicaux d'Haiti (AMDH), the Haitian NGO that is primarily responsible for CHE programs in Haiti, held a preliminary meeting but didn't have a quorum present. Two weeks ago they met again, and in this picture you see five of the seven board members -- one was still unable to come due to injury, another was out of the country. Also in this picture are the three AMDH staff, Enoch (The Water School, formerly with AMDH), and me. What a great step for this organization.

Today in the office Wilnique, Clercilien, Evelyne, and Solencia were putting together "gift bags" for our trainers and CHEs. Our nearly 500 volunteers are truly volunteers, meaning they don't receive any renumeration. So we're putting together bags with toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, soap, oral rehydration salts, sheets, and towels. Kind of like the gift bags at the Oscars. :-)

United Nations peacekeeping force from Nepal, sightseeing.

I took this picture of a typical fishing boat from my lodgings.

Training in Limbe

Okay, here I am teaching my first formal lesson in Kreyol! I love this picture because my colleague Evelyne (far left) could not look less enthused. ;-)

Here are Enoch and Clercilien, making a "fly" out of a banana, matches, and leaves. It was used in a skit about cholera transmission.

We held two big trainings the second week of January, one for our trainers in the province of the northeast, and this one in the north. We wanted to make sure that all of our trainers had the latest lessons on cholera prevention and treatment, including the Doctors without Borders strategy of oral rehydration posts scattered throughout the communities to prevent the countless deaths that have been occurring when people cannot get to cholera treatment centers in time. (It is often impossible to travel at night and in the rural areas distances are long over difficult roads.)

Here is Madame Grimard, one of our other core facilitators, teaching a lesson called "God and Cholera." There is a pervasive belief here that God is cursing Haiti. This lesson goes through Scripture passages showing that God seeks to bless us. We then discussed practically that God had indeed given us everything we needed to combat cholera, including essentially free methods for hand washing and making water potable.

And finally, here is Anias -- he works with our partner organization The Water School. He moved back north after surviving the devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince last January and started with us in the spring. His amazing work with the SODIS method for making potable water along with training on hygiene and latrines has now expanded from zero to thirty communities. He has a fabulous smile, can you see it?

Cholera Treatment Center photos

In December I had the opportunity to work a few more nights in a cholera treatment center in Haut Limbe (see previous posting). Above is 15-year-old Juan. He was very ill, and you can see that he has two IVs running. But when one of the volunteers was making balloons for the kids, he was well enough to ask for a cat to be drawn on his!

Here I am at 5 am with a volunteer named Travis, a fabulous ICU/ED nurse. The first night we worked together he put in an IV in the scalp of a little girl for whom they just hadn't been able to keep IVs going the day before. Scalp veins are really tiny, so only small amounts of fluid can pass through them, and this girl was very sick. So he and I stayed at the bedside to push fluids via syringe into the catheter. While we were doing this dawn broke, and the family members throughout the center started a worship service from the bedside. They sang hymns, recited psalms, and prayed out loud. What a beautiful accompaniment to our work, to be reminding of the One who is always working in and through and around us to bring healing!

Rehydration is the key to curing cholera. Here a girl is receiving oral rehydration solution from a family member in addition to her IV fluids.

This picture was taken the day this boy arrived. I met him the next day, and although he was still quite sick he was sitting up at the end of his bed drinking oral rehydration solution from a pop bottle, a little cutie-pie.