Back to bugs

I left my bathroom light on by mistake earlier tonight, which always brings an assortment of smallish bugs in around the screen. As I was getting ready for bed, I saw this interesting one.

It wasn't until I opened up the photo files on my computer that I realized that I had caught something my eyes hadn't been able to catch - the split second when it's wings separated.

Where I am

Sometimes I still need to remind myself where I am.

One morning last week I was going to see the feeding program at the church school at Kapen before it was done for the year. I was in the pickup with Pouchon and Jean Rony.

We were driving along and I saw some kids in one of their local school uniforms, which has a pink shirt that brought a question to mind.

"Pouchon, nan Ayiti eske gen gwo zwazo ki woz?". Are there any large pink birds in Haiti?


"Non".


I went on to tell him about flamingos, explaining a large pink bird in Florida that stands on one foot, while envisioning how beautiful and ornate they are.

"Can you eat them?" he asked.

A quick succession of thoughts passed through my mind. In a split second I went from revulsion and incredulity, to remembering that here in Haiti a lot of things come down to survival. If my family was hungry it would make perfect sense to eat flamingo.

Pouchon went on to explain to me that there are large white birds in Haiti that stand on one foot and live near water. I can't remember the Kreyol name for them, but he said they are also called "poul dlo" or water chickens. The name doesn't leave much room to wonder if they eat them or not.

Confidentiality

There's a huge cultural difference between us privacy-obsessed North Americans and Haitians. And you are especially aware of it if you work in healthcare.

When I worked in a hospital in the US I had to sign agreements of confidentiality and was required to take yearly tests to show that I understood the concepts as they pertain to healthcare and patient rights. And I agree with the need. It is no one's business who I see, where I go, or why and I respect that right for others.

In Haiti, things are much different even though we do attempt to provide privacy to our patients here at our hospital, especially for patients who have HIV/AIDS. Our staff signs agreements as well, but no one here seems to EXPECT to have privacy so there doesn't seem to be any negative consequences when they don't.

My friend V's older sister was recently admitted to our hospital with something that just needed to be monitored and to have her medication adjusted. She was with us for a couple of days and I went down to say hello to her a couple of times. I spoke with V on the phone a few times while she was here and he didn't say anything about it. He's working in another part of the country. I assumed that his sister would have told him she was in the hospital if she wanted him to know or she would ask someone else close to the household to do it. I also thought the confidentiality rules were the same here as at home.

V came back to visit a couple of weeks later and found out that his sister had been in the hospital AND that I knew and didn't tell him. He was incredibly hurt that I didn't. When I tried to explain to him why, that I could end up in big trouble, he wouldn't listen. He just kept saying that it was probably different in my culture. When I tried to explain that I was thinking of his sister's rights, he did not understand.

So I asked the medical director what the privacy policy is, hoping for some way to explain to V that I did the right thing. Turns out the policy is that I can tell WHO I see in the hospital but I just can't say WHY the person is in the hospital.

If I had a chance for a do-over, I'd ask his sister if she wanted someone to let him know. I'm still sure I did the right thing by not saying anything to V, but it's kind of tough to be judged for simply respecting someone's right to privacy.

Little kindnesses

I was up drinking my coffee this morning when Dieumene and Sola arrived and plunked a bag on the table beside me. They had made tea because I was "gripe" (gree-pay), had a cold, yesterday. They wanted to show me the ingredients today before they made me some more. The only thing I know the name of is the hibiscus flower which they call choublak.

It makes a very nice tea with grated ginger and lots of sugar. Not sure if it did anything for my cold, but it did wonders for my mental attitude :)

Feeling free to whine

It's 92 degrees in my room and I have a fever. My throat is sore, I can't sleep because I'm coughing all the time. My nose is leaking and I just feel rotten. I also just discovered a fourth patch of ringworm on my butt. Wonderful.

No one needs to feel sorry for me, I'm doing perfectly well with that on my own.

Hard work, tough hands

We have three really great women who cook for us, do the laundry and clean. When we have teams of visitors here they work even harder.

We just had a large team leave so all of the bedding and towels have been collected for doing laundry this week. This is what I saw in the tiny laundry room today.

We don't have a washing machine. Most of these are thick bath sheets. Can you imagine how difficult these are to scrub and wring out by hand?

Ti Sola is the one who usually gets the honour of doing the laundry. She also washes my clothes for me once every week or two, and irons them.

Saturday

It's Saturday morning and Nicole and I are sitting on the little galeri by the kitchen door. I'm doing some data entry for the nutrition program and Nicole is sitting balanced on the ledge. She says she has some serious cabin fever today. Just for fun she is sniffing all of the Mr. Sketch markers to see what flavour/scent they are. She's been throwing the ones she likes to me so that I can smell them too. She's nice that way.

I'm not feeling so well. I have a sore throat and cough that doesn't seem to want to progress to a full-fledged head cold. I've been taking a strong muscle relaxant at night because I've been getting painful muscle spasms in my back while I sleep so I'm still kind of dopey from it. And to top it all off, I seem to have contracted ringworm which has left a bright red itchy circle about the size of a quarter on my left cheek. As if I need anything else to make my skin look bad :( I've been here for 15 months with no malaria, no dengue, no horrible food or water-borne illnesses, so I guess I'm due for something. I just hope it doesn't scar.

Just to get all of my complaining out, I'm also feeling down because none of the mothers from the ambulatory nutrition program have shown up today to clean the beans to make Akamil. This has been an issue almost from the beginning and I'm not sure how we're going to address it.

Will try to write something a little more uplifting later on.

Sorry to the writer who requested to hear from the Loyola team. I put the request out for guest bloggers and didn't get any takers. They should be home by now, so maybe you'll get to hear their stories first-hand. They had a great trip, did a lot of good work, and were a really nice group.

Wasting time

I'll never get those 20 minutes back :)

Circle the cat


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