Its 86° at 10:30am in Baltimore on Sunday, June 27, 10 days after returning from Haiti. Its already a little hard to go back to Haiti, even mentally. Its going up to 98° later, but we’ll be in the AC enough not to be bothered by it. Debbie and I are back from the Baltimore farmer’s market. What a stupendous wealth of grown things. Debbie will start volunteering at her friend, Pam’s organic farm tomorrow in exchange for boxes and boxes of fresh grown food. I emptied my perforated trash can that was supposed to be making beautiful compost. It wasn’t too good. Its OK though, because I know I’ll adjust and it’ll get better, and then good, and then ‘very good.’ That’s the trajectory of good living.
Its hard to imagine upward trends like that for most Haitians anytime soon. Still, check out the latest photo update from my patient/friend Myrline:
I thought we had made a prosthetic liner. I didn’t know we were making for a Saturday Night Live conehead flashback. Haitian people are irrepressible.
My time in Haiti was much more of a vacation than it was for the rest of ‘Team Sinai’: no problem with heat (Alabama upbringing?), no mosquito bites (with or without a net or deet), plenty of sleep, not one but two Sabbaths (Saturday with the Adventists and Sunday with Mission of Hope), a pretty light load of patients, and no life threatening emergencies (the closest thing being when I thought I was messing up my prosthetic work). It doesn’t seem quite fair. Especially the part where about a dozen super attractive young women came into the shop and bared their legs, and took turns casting each other to make cosmetic covers for future Haitian prostheses. And cosmetic they will be. I am sure there is some sort of Halacha (Jewish law) saying I shouldn’t have been witnessing such a thing. If I chuckled when it was happening, the devil made me do it. Yeah, Haiti was tough.
The thing about the work I do is that its not done in a week, really. The real outcome depends on a longer dynamic process and responsive relationships. The real outcome doesn’t show itself for a while, maybe a few months, and several people need to put their bit in: There needs to be therapy, fitting adjustments to accommodate limb changes, and the user needs to develop various patterns of understanding and behavior. Maybe the best thing that remains from this trip is the set of connections that are still functioning which can support some of that longer term sort of thing.
After I write this I will review the report that Dhinesh made for me. He is a ‘personal assistant’ in Bangalore, India who works for the company GetFriday. (You should check it out and say I sent you when you use the service so I can get my service for free.) I share him with a patient/dear friend in New Jersey. He investigated how a free listserve can be done for the various prosthetists who volunteer at Mission of Hope. If it works, the participating prosthetists might pool resources and coordinate with Diana Cherry, the prosthetic coordinator and up and coming prosthetist at MOH, so that whoever is going down next can take with them the optimum amount of exactly what’s needed, and we (the prosthetists) can speak to each other to refine techniques and solve whatever problems show themselves. One practitioner has already offered to host a Haitian for a year to train him or her in prosthetics. That’s a line of input to be supported for sure. Its just one more puzzle piece that might support moving things from not good, to better, and eventually to very good for as many people as possible, and for Haiti itself as much as possible. Haiti is a blessing to me in the sense of having the chance to connect to people literally all over the world for a worthwhile common purpose that involves a dynamic, very human, set of relationships and developments. Its engagements like that, even more than any trajectory, that makes for real living, Enough preachy stuff. Sorry.
Team Sinai is superb in that each person is super competent, super to be around, super organized, and super effective as a team. My own orbit is not exactly the emergent hospital thing, but there is enough overlap for real connection. I am so grateful that it exists.
John Logue CPO
No comments:
Post a Comment