The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [80]
Over time, Pastor Cyncre helped tremendously in our efforts. He was the backbone of the village. He registered people as official residents of the camp so that we could ensure an equitable distribution of aid to everyone there. He also organized teams of people to serve as a citizens’ patrol, keeping the villagers safe from violent looters and rapists at night. Thanks in large part to Pastor Cyncre, our camp was relatively peaceful, with lower crime rates than other IDP villages around Port-au-Prince.
Late one night while lying in my tent, I wrote this letter to my friends:
When I find myself crouched in a narrow passageway of Cité Soleil, the most horrible slum in Haiti, I feel at peace. There is nowhere in the world I would rather be than here. An inch of raw sewage covers the ground, and naked children play in it like it is fresh grass. Pigs sunbathe around us as these young ones, infected with worms and scabies, cuddle me in excitement. I feel like a rock star, though I have nothing to give them but love.
Later, in the clinic, a shy girl with a runny nose and scabies eating away at her head asks me for water. I pour a tiny medical cup full of it, and she sits back with a smile, slowly letting it slide back into her mouth like pudding. I realize that it is probably the first time she has ever tasted pure water. I am humbled in my heart as I pour her another cup, and then another. I give her mother a few sanitary pads, a bar of soap, and a can of milk, and she cries at her wonderful presents.
This is why I stay here. This is humanity, and I’m sitting in the depths of it. In Haiti, you feel alive and in Haiti, everyone’s love is appreciated. In Haiti, it is what’s on the inside that counts and we are all God’s treasures.
xxx Alison
Our 103rd delivery. They named her Alison.
On May 17, four months after the quake, we delivered our first stillborn baby. She was our first death in childbirth since we took over the hospital in late January. We’d had 103 successful deliveries so far. But this baby had already been dead inside her mother’s belly; her skull had been cracked open when her mother fell during the earthquake. Because most Haitians don’t receive prenatal care—and didn’t even before the earthquake—the mother hadn’t known that her fetus had died months before.
In New York, I had often thought of Twitter as a useless waste of people’s time and intellect, but in Haiti it became a valuable tool. Although I had hesitated to sign up, I ended up using it to call out to the world for help on a regular basis. One day, we had a lady dying of rabies, so I sent a tweet out, and within four hours someone had the antidote flown in from the Dominican Republic to save her life. Days later, I was weak and sick in my tent after having vomited all night. When I called out for help from my tent, none of the volunteers around me could hear because the generator was blasting so loudly. So I tweeted my message, and someone alerted Aleda, a volunteer in the tent next to mine, and she raced in to help, which made us both laugh. Another time, when all the hospitals were out of oxygen, we found a fresh supply via Twitter by offering to trade some whiskey for it.
I spent most of my time helping to oversee the hospital, sharing love, and keeping the volunteer medical staff coordinated and happy. I also made regular trips with the mobile clinic out into tent villages across the city, since the people in many camps weren’t receiving any medical care at all. The government had declared mobile clinics like ours to be the most effective way of dealing with local health issues. We regularly visited Cité Soleil, a slum that was already in terrible condition before the quake.
The J/P HRO hospital
After our original team of amazing New York City doctors had left, we formed a partnership with CMAT/IMAT, the Canadian Medical Assistance Team and