Bucket Shower

It is a great feeling to wake up this Friday morning knowing that at approximately 9:00 am, I would be finished with my last final of winter quarter and by 10 am, packing my backpack for Haiti. I had envisioned what this moment would feel like when I had 10 finals stacked against me. I pretty much floated through my exam and returned home, to a living room full of donations we had gathered to take with us to MamaBaby Haiti. Donations that had been piling up for 2 weeks of baby clothes, mama clothes, toys, tinctures, supplements and toiletries and I opened my inbox to find a 60 page Crash Course Manual of common diseases to expect in Haiti, to be read and mastered before I arrived on SUNDAY! I had a moment of panic wondering how in the world I could have put this reading off until the day of my flight. What kind of doctor was I going to be if I couldn’t find the time to read and prepare for something so important? A glass of wine helped calm the nerves and my roommates and I frantically started throwing things in suitcases.

A group of 10 of us flew in to the Dominican Republic where we stayed in a hostel in Santo Domingo and planned to take a chartered bus called Caribe Tours across the border. You pay them a flat fee, hand over your passport and they do the rest. Luckily we had a Spanish speaker with us to navigate Santo Domingo because when we arrived at the bus station in the morning we found out the border was closed. Haiti recently held presidential elections in November and many riots occurred. Some volunteers at MamaBaby during this time were evacuated and had to pretend one of them had cholera and rode out of the city in an ambulance to safety. This time around was a rather peaceful voting day and Haiti has elected a former recording artist, businessman, and friend of Wyclef Jean, Michel Martelly. His past relationships with members of the Haitian government have been criticized, but more importantly, he has the majority support of Haitians and the country could use any amount of stability it can get right now.

Since we were unable to make it across the border we opted to hop on a bus to the next biggest city in the DR, Santiago and explore a beach north of the city for the day. By Monday morning the border was open and we were on our way. Crossing the border was an adventure. Incredibly easy because we never had to get off the bus, but I had no idea what to expect and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. The difference in landscape moving from the lush, green Dominican Republic to the highly populated, brown dusty field of Haiti was shocking. It was as simple as one child wearing a t-shirt and shoes on one side of a yellow line and a shoeless, un-bathed, naked child on the other. I wondered how it had come to this.

It was market day at the border on the Haitain side and the dirt field was lined with tents, kids and adults selling “stuff”. It looked like piles of things that had probably been donated to Haiti and were now being sold to those that had money, which I would imagine is only volunteers. Many kids ran angrily along side of the bus, while I tried to take pictures discreetly and I couldn’t blame them as they yelled me at. My first taste of anger and aggression stuck with me as we drove through the streets of Cap Haitian. Market day at the border did not prepare me for what I saw. Hundreds of people hanging out in the streets in a city that appears to be halted in construction. Half-finished buildings, dust, dirt, grime, burning piles of trash, a murky river, and sad faces were what I saw of the second largest city in Haiti. I don’t know how much of these feelings I projected, but I sensed aggression and fear and struggled a great deal to find beauty.

Sean, one of the directors of MamaBaby and a recent graduate of the Naturopathic School in Arizona, SCNM, met us at the bus stop and loaded us on a tap-tap. Tap-taps are basically truck beds that have two wooden benches on either side and covered. As many people and as much luggage as you possibly fit on to them you do, and then you squeeze on more. Our tap-tap had to weave back through the hundreds of people in the streets to get out of the city and into the village where the clinic is, Morne Rouge. I was almost positive at this point we were never going to see our luggage again, which was riding on a separate tap-tap with a guard, but man those Haitian drivers can drive and I never lost sight of it. Dinner was ready for us after we toured the clinic and we were given an introduction to what it’s like to not know when you’re going to have power. Electricity is impossible to predict and plumbing doesn’t work if there’s not power. We had to keep buckets full of water to flush the toilets, wash clothes, and possibly take ‘bucket showers’ if we had to go for days. In addition to bucket filling instructions, Sean asked us to tell our worst diarrhea story. At the time I thought he was trying to lighten the mood (it’s a big joke amongst Naturopaths that we like to talk about bowel movements, because it can reveal a lot about a patient's health), but now I know he was preparing us for what could happen while adjusting to Creole food! Luckily I had a pretty iron stomach all week and I will thank my Grapefruit Seed Extract, which I poured in EVERYTHING! By the time I set up my mosquito net over my bed I was exhausted and eager to wake up in the morning for our first rural clinic day.  I will post on day 2 tomorrow… J