Dumpster Diving

We'll be in Haiti next week, so we're down to the wire on our preparations.  Aaron and his crew are busy readying the anesthesia and pediatric gear, John is preparing surgical sets, and the rest of us are getting our gear together for wound care, nursing care, nutrition, and any number of miscellaneous items. Just when we thought we had all bases covered, we heard that the hospital is "very very low on IV fluids...." so now wer're scrambling to locate IV bags of Lactated Ringers Solution. Luckily, our hospital has a corner of the Recieving Dock set aside for discards from the hospital. We are allowed to "dumpster dive" for all kinds of goodies that would otherwise be periodically picked up by a distribution group called Project Hope. (Sorry Hopers.....we diverted some of the discards that were coming your way...)

 It's been weekend of packing. We were about 90% done when American Airlines threw us a curveball: there is an embargo on any extra bags to Haiti. We were hoping to have several of the team members take three checked bags so that we could bring in more gear. AA says ixnay on that. Now we're scrambling to jettison that which is not "mission critical" and make our selves leaner and meaner. AA also decided that they will only accept duffle bags (no crates). Great news for Aaron who just finished packing his delicate anesthesia monitors and other breakables into 6 shipping crates and now has to move everything into duffles. It could have been worse, we could have found this out at the airport during "check in"....

Packing is an event, and in this picture, you can see Amy Montillano (the O.R. nurse on Team Sinai) and Ella Joy Napoles. Ella is a Sinai O.R. nurse who has been on missions past with us, but unfortunately can't make it to Haiti. However, she is planning to go with us to Ecuador in October. Ella is a great sport, and spent Sunday afternoon at Chez Herzenberg helping us with the packing.