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Chicago Community of Concern Visits Haiti
[Editor’s note: The PIH Bulletin’s Fall 2008 edition included a feature about the Greenwich, Conn., Community of Concern and its partnership with a village in Rwanda. Here we introduce you to the Chicago Area Community of Concern, which has raised over half a million dollars to build a new hospital in Lacolline, Haiti. The Community also recently brought the PIH Photo Exhibit to the Loyola University Museum of Art, where it enjoyed one of the largest openings in the museum’s history. In early January of this year, three representatives of the group—Marjorie Benton, Sonny Garg, and Betsy Dietel—traveled to Haiti with PIH Development Director Suzanne Battit. These are excerpts from Betsy’s report on their visit.]
We spent three days visiting various PIH sites with David Walton [a PIH doctor from the Chicago area]. Over the past two years, our community of concern has raised over $500,000 for a hospital in Lacolline and women’s health center in Lascahobas. We were impressed to see the impact of our funds in such a short time. After passing mile upon mile of poor huts and people on foot, we arrived at Lacolline Hospital, serving a catchment area of over 100,000 people. The hospital is newly completed and is in stark contrast to the region’s pervasive poverty. The layout consists of a one-story, bright white concrete building that has no frills but is stunning in its simplicity. Recently planted tropical flowering shrubs, arbors and trees are the first real green we saw all day and offer a soothing respite in this poorest region in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.The complex has inpatient and outpatient wards that are separated by an open courtyard with a simple rock formation fountain and Paul Farmer’s trademark, a fishpond. Metal hammered artwork adorns the walls and frames the windows and door grates. The inpatient clinic consists of separate wards for women, men and children each containing 15 beds and a nurses’ station. There are bright touches of artwork on the walls and pastel papier-mache flowers in vases. Family mem¬bers feed patients and congregate in the hallways. Many of them walk from miles away to get to the hospital and often spend days or weeks by the bed¬side of ailing family members. Slatted windows and overhead fans keep the air moving. Everywhere we go people come up to Dr. David Walton, a 32-year-old, Harvard-trained internist who has worked in Haiti for the past nine years, and give him a big hug and kiss. We meet several people who beam as he explains their diagnosis; a young man with a twinkling smile who was dying of AIDS and is now stabilized, a skinny young preteen, recently orphaned, who had a cancerous tumor. While there is much to celebrate there is also tremendous suffering that is most evident in the children’s ward where several babies are suffering from Kwashiorkor. The skin literally hangs off their fragile skeletons, and their haunting faces are hard to look at, especially when you know what lies ahead of them. A toddler in a corner of the ward, being spoon-fed by a beautiful young mother, is being treated for third degree burns, a common occurrence since most families cook over open fires that are a tremendous threat to knee high toddlers. The Chicago Area Community of Concern is now focusing on raising funds for a new hospital in Mirebalais, a bustling market town of about 60,000 people strategically located at a crossroads between four other PIH facilities. A visit to the old hospital that still has a few patients speaks volumes about the horrific conditions that have plagued this medical facility. The hospital, housed in a large concrete building with peeling paint, sits at the bottom of a hill. In front of the building is an old, rusted Land Rover that perches on concrete blocks where the tires once existed—a metaphor for the hospital and what it represents. Crumbling concrete along the roofline, dangling masses of electrical wires and steel reinforcing bars jut out of the top of the building. While the outside is bad, the inside is worse. There is no air movement and the fetid odor of raw sewage prevails. A young woman who is obviously hurt sits alone in the waiting area quietly crying. There are a few poor souls in rooms off the entrance. Other remnants of better days remain—a mangled hospital bed frame, patient files stuffed into shelves, used vials, soiled linens and discarded medicine bottles.The original plan was for PIH to renovate the building until the Cuban government approached the mayor and proposed converting the building into a center for infectious disease (CID). Cuba has built over 60 of these centers throughout Central and South America and had just finished one in Mirebalais when the floods hit this past fall and destroyed it. The revised plan is for PIH to construct a new hospital that would be located above the CID on a ridge of land that has a 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. David will be in charge of the project and is in the process of drafting a plan and budget. The project will be phased with the first phase being a clinic with two surgical rooms similar to Lacolline, followed by a residential building for staff and a mini-clinic health outpost program with referrals to Mirebalais. We were all struck by the strategic location of the site as it relates to the local population’s needs and access, the opportunity to benefit from the proximity to the Cuban CID, the mayor’s action oriented leadership (he has already rebuilt the town square and is now working on a new library and mayoral office) and the beauty of the natural site.