Charlucie Jaboin and I talked on the phone yesterday. She is a Haitian woman who lives in New York and is the president of the the Reveil Matinal Orphanage in Port au Prince. The 20 girls are hers. She and her group are thanking God that we found them. The orphanage was formed 4 years ago, sometimes they do not have enough food, right now they have not paid their staff in months. She is my new best friend and we are making plans. Here is an excerpt from my email to her.
We are so busy here with the benefit for the orphanage, it is making me a little crazy. We have 2 slide shows next week to inform the public about our work in Haiti and promote the music festival. We have teams going to the Sierra Nevada Music Festival at the same time to person a table to promote the event and sell tickets. I have never put on an event this big and I might explode in the process. If you are Adventist then you know about the Sabbath (I am not Adventist). I am on the Sacred Work Council at our hospital (an Adventist hospital). We have talked about the meaning of the Sabbath and I have been thinking about it a lot lately. I want to rest, reflect, rejuvenate, for 24 hours each week. I see the point.
PS. I am holding everyone of your girls in my heart and prayers, I love them and want to be part of helping them grow up to be beautiful women who have a good life.
Today I went to the website rmof.org and made a donation with pay pal.
Words from Becky
I wanted to share this email I got from Junior, one of the translators. It is so sweet. I thought you'd want to share it as words from a Haitian. I can't believe HE is thanking ME so much.
----- Message transféré ----
De : Variant Augustin Junior
Hey Becky, how are you ? This is Variant Augustin Junior. It's a pleasure to me to write you in this time, for being able to know how are you doing and to say how much I was happy by reason of your help that you gave in Haiti. The main thing cause me to write you is because I wanted to say to you hello, to know how was your trip? How your family is doing, and to thank you the big thing that you did in Haiti. I didn't find any chance to thank you when you're in Haiti. You are very kind-full and a co-worker with the Haitian patients. I don't have any treasures to offer you to reimburse you but you're an angel. I believe that God knows anything that I wanted to give to you so that is gonna push me to pray for you. That God protects you in anything that your doing most of all when you're walking in the street and keep on blessing you with your family completely. Keep straight you in his way. This is Junior your loving translator which never forget you.
God bless you.
Words from Briana Ukiah Team 4
Things are going fine. A large group of volunteers 25 arrived last Friday. Most of them are from Children’s Hospital Oakland. We have a pediatric anesthesiologist, pediatric plastic surgeon, two pediatric intensivists, two adult orthopedic residents, a general surgeon, two family practice MDs, an ER doc, and two midwives. In addition to about 12 plus nurses, 2 PTs, and 1 OT. The hospital is well covered. So much so many people find themselves looking for something to do. I have moved from urgent care, to the lab, to surgery over the course of my stay.
I had the opportunity to steal a translator and spend some time in the lab. They have a tremendous amount of work on their hands. They do not have a hematology analyzer so everything is completed manually. In addition their chemistry analyzer is from the 60's and has a very limited capability. So much so that the lab techs manually separate a patient's sample into multiple test tubes, add a specific reagent (na, k, cl, etc) and wait for the reaction to complete. Then each tube is loaded on the analyzer one by one to be read. They are definitely held back by their lack of tools. They can’t do gram stains as requested because they don’t have grams iodine?? Seems to me that they need some attention, a point of care hematology and chemistry analyzer would help them tremendously and grams iodine shouldn’t be to hard to get. I am sure the practitioners would appreciate it as well. I enjoyed my time in the lab, they were a great group of people. I think they were happy to have someone take interest in what they were doing and hopefully they will benefit from it.
Its been raining a bunch. Makes the air extra humid but it tends to be a bit cooler, although not too much. The rain is worrisome though, more rain will bring more disease and less viable shelter. The streets have rushing water already, and its just the beginning.
The hospital is starting to charge for surgeries, urgent care visits, lab, xray, and a daily volunteer fee. I have heard from several translators that they aren’t being paid which is unfortunate. Seems like without translators most of this work would be impossible. Good thing they have gracious translators who
continue to help without pay out of the kindness of their hearts and deep dedication to help their people.
Pictures: Hands, Translators, Michelle the Pediatrician, Briana on the job.
No comments:
Post a Comment