The man with no shoes

Last week, the soldiers brought a man with a big gash on his foot for me to see. He was bare feet and stepped on a piece of glass. When I took a breather that morning, I happened to look out the back door, I saw a man working at digging a trench for the wall of the clinic using a pick axe, he was bare footed. Each time the pick axe landed on the ground, it seemed it was inches from his feet. I tried to look for a pair of old shoes from the donation from Texas but only found over sized shoes. John brought him in and explained to him that the doctor did not want him to go about bare feet. We finally were able to find him a pair of old shoes with a hole in one of them. With a pair of socks and his shoes, he was happy.

Today I brought the pair of shoes that Ted picked up from the Caribe bus left behind by one of the relief persons. These I gave to him and gave his old pair to his friend who was wearing a pair of shoes with huge holes on the sides. Many more workers showed me that they did not have shoes but were wearing slippers. Unfortunately I had no more shoes to give to them.

I was the only person left now to run the clinic at Blanchard. The woman with the crushed injury returned to have her dressing changed, she almost fainted. A woman with twins returned with worsening mastitis and another with jaundice with a belly that grew large over a short period that I feared that she had something ominous. All I could do was to ask her to go to the nearest hospital. A man came in with a crushed finger and a partially avulsed nail from a hammer injury.

We had so many patients that Benite had to see some of the less sick patients and Woodman was my interpreter for the rest of the afternoon.
The clothes that Dawn donated from Texas were too large for any of the Haitians to wear. Instead Gale had them cut up and sewn into blankets.