Haiti Jan. 18, 2013

I spoke with Ramata on the phone that morning, who’d flown out from Portland, she goes to the same church as me, Immaculate Heart. She wants to do work with the mobile clinics in the future, but will be flying back to Portland th next day, she was only out briefly for another group. She does trauma care and is originally from the Congo where there have been many traumas so it is a great future source of support as many people in Haiti have endured significant traumas. If possible, she’d join for the mobile clinics this Saturday before flying back to Portland. I had planned to spend this Friday working with Dr. Ramel who is the medical director in a clinic in a town called Croix-des-Bouquet I’d volunteered at before which provides a variety of community services from maternal care to primary and speciality services. He had a group come out from Puerto Rico who were holding a remote mobile clinic. Due to my transportation issues and having a cold, I was unable to make it in time. I decided to use the afternoon to prepare for our mobile clinic on Saturday, the last before my departure, although the plan is for the Haitian clinicians to continue them in my absence. It required more planning to make them successful then I realized. Our hope for Saturday was to have a sort of grand finale and have two clinics, one at the camp in Cite Soleil which really is intense with the high volume of patient’s needing care and another after in one of the clinicians churches near downtown which I’d previously volunteered in with him and his friend running a mobile clinic in 2012. I really liked doing clinics in churches as it was a nice way to meet the health needs in the local community and also in tented camps as it was a chance to really meet complex health care and ideally in the future social needs.