By CARRIE PETERSEN
| Posted: Sunday, July 29, 2007 12:00 am
Albany Democrat-Herald
When you step off the plane onto the tarmac, the heat and humidity hit you as if you've run into a cement wall.
Outside the front doors of the airport are crowds and men grabbing to haul your luggage.
There's a blinding sun and dusty roads, and everyone is talking in Creole.
Driving up the national highway in a 13-passenger Land Cruiser - your last chance for air conditioning for the week - you pass by garbage piles, crowded markets, half-constructed buildings and United Nations convoys. You see people riding donkeys and bicycles, women carrying basins on their heads, and children with little clothing but perhaps chewing on a mango or a piece of sugarcane.
This is Haiti. And this a place I love.
The trip
I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Haiti with a medical team sent by Haiti Foundation of Hope, based in Vancouver, Wash., and Medical Teams International, based in Portland.
Other team members from the mid-valley were my parents, Glenn and Ann Petersen, Gina Burrese, Maralee Knox and Judy Fowlkes, all of Albany, and Laura Mackie of Lacomb.
Five other team members were from other parts of the West Coast and we were joined by about two dozen Haitians in country.
I first went to Haiti as a kid, then as a teenager, and I've since returned as an adult.
On this trip, we traveled about six hours north of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. To say the road is bumpy is an understatement. The roads are in such a condition that our six-hour drive only covered about 100 miles.
We stayed in Terre Blanche, a village in the mountains of northern Haiti. I've heard it said that there are about 2,000 people in the community but that remains a bit of a mystery to me. The houses - mostly mud huts with thatched or tin roofs - are tucked into the hillsides and most are invisible from the one road that travels through the area.
The only thing to distinguish it as a community is a well, a church, a school and a newly built medical clinic. There are no stores, no government buildings, and no electricity or running water.
The pastor of the church there has said that he feels called to work with the "poorest of the poor" - and this is where they live.
The clinic
The clinic, which opened its doors earlier this year, has two nurses and a pharmacist who work year-round, but no doctors.
We moved in and set up our temporary clinic and pharmacy on the first floor. The second floor became our living quarters for the week. The third floor was the roof, a great place to find an evening breeze or watch a lightning storm above the mountains.
About half of our team was comprised of people with no medical training. That included me. My job in the clinic varied from day to day and sometimes moment to moment. I counted pills in the pharmacy, took weights and temperatures as patients came in the door, assisted doctors, did lab work, and made sure patients didn't get lost in the maze that we called the clinic.
We saw about 1,500 patients while we were in Terre Blanche. They came by "tap-tap" bus, motorcycle, truck, on foot and riding donkeys. Some were carried on beds or homemade stretchers.
There were always crowds outside the compound gate, and the guards had to struggle with people as they let in a few patients at a time. During one morning, some of the crowd broke through and poured into the courtyard. We stopped for a moment while the chaos settled and then went back to work.
Some of the health problems we saw are universal: Headaches, backaches, poor eyesight, strokes, cancer and HIV.
But we also saw things that aren't so commonplace here in the United States: Malaria, untreated cancer and abscesses, malnutrition, severe infections and scabies.
We had two healthy babies born in the clinic. One, a girl, was our first patient. The mother had walked to the clinic, sat outside most of the day and delivered the baby in the afternoon. A couple of hours later, she walked home. The second baby, a boy, was born during the night. Upstairs, sleeping on our mats on the floor, we woke to the sound of his newborn cries. We fell back asleep only to be woken up a few hours later by the sound of donkeys.
Several patients were sent to a hospital for treatment that we couldn't provide. They included a pregnant woman who needed to deliver early and a young girl with an abdominal abscess. We heard later that all three, including the baby, were doing well.
The hope
In Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," he writes, "The question that all visitors to Haiti ask themselves is whether there is any hope for the county, and the usual answer is 'no.'"
If there is a place that exists without hope, it's not hard for me to imagine that that place is Haiti. But then I think about all my experiences there and I realize that hope, although sometimes hard to see, does persist.
It's in the faces of kids walking to school because, unlike their parents, they have a school to attend. Hope is in the eyes of a mother who has just heard a doctor explain that he has good medicine and that her child is going to get well.
Hope exists in clean water coming from a bio-sand filter, and it's carried on the heads of women and children leaving the clinic with beans and rice in addition to their medicine.
It's in the smile of a gray-haired woman trying on a pair of reading glasses and realizing she can see. Hope is felt when looking into the Haitian mountains and watching the rain fall on dry crops.
When I'm at home in Albany, my mind sometimes wanders to the dusty roads of Haiti and the faces of those I've left behind. I think about all the heartache and sadness that I've seen and I realize how easy it would be to give up on hope.
But then I remember Antoinese, a little girl who wears the same outfit every day. I've never seen her in a pair of shoes but she's always wearing a smile and laughing, reminding me that life can be good.
There is so much more I can write about Haiti and this trip, like the giant tarantulas we saw, the good food we ate and the friends we made, but it's time for me to stop.
There are more photos posted at democratherald.com if you want to see more of Haiti.