Friday, February 5, 2010

The patients of Carrefour and the boy who passed 7 worms









Day 3 at Carrefour, There must be a hundred or more patients lining outside the clinic.

John and Rick asked me to see a youngster with what looked like Madura feet. We had no anti-fungal medications for him. We added this to our wish list.

The boy who passed 7 worms came back with his tall sister, we had some albendazole for them. At the end of the visit he very calmly told Benite that his mother died yesterday. We learned that their mother had been ill before the earthquake but she had crushed injuries and whether this quickened her demise, we would never know. It just struck me how calm and accepting this little boy of the fate doled out to him... Benite and I just cried over this. I had nothing for him but an energy bar brought a little smile on the faces of these two children.

A young man came to see us for a urinary tract infection and several skin sores. He made me laugh when he told us that he was in the shower when the earthquake occurred and he came running out only to find that his house was collapsing and he jumped onto the next house which fell as well and he proceeded to jump onto the next house, finally running out in the street, stark naked.

We had a nightmarish ride home, detouring many times because of horrendous traffic jam. Papi was a saint, patiently driving us around making plenty of U-turns. He almost missed our exit to our home, it was easy to do so because the streets were quite dark and we took close to 3 hours to come home!

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