Abby Montague (PL3) learns Creole and tours Port-au-Prince

Posted on behalf of Abby Montague (PL3)

Bonswa from Haiti!

Since Adam told you all good morning, I thought I'd start with "good evening" in Creole!  

Abby Montague (PL3), Hope Pogemiller (MP4), Ben Trappey (MedPeds Hospitalist), Calla Brown (MP3), Adam Foss (MP4), and Mahsa Abassi (Global Health Chief, Medicine)

We've settled in pretty well here after our first week.  Our Creole is coming along okay - piecing together some of Calla's Spanish and Hope's French with our Haitian friends' phrases.  I have been spending my days at St. Damien's Children's hospital with 2 residents from Virginia while Hope and Calla are at St. Luc's for adults (Adam has gone back and forth).  

St Luc

Every morning at St. Damien's, we start the day with mass, including small funeral rituals for the dead from both hospitals from the previous day.  There's so much more death than I'm used to.  As one of our Haitian doctors wrote in the NEJM, "Death's ubiquity, however, does not mean it deserves any less attention or thought" (2012;367:8-9).  I have many thoughts, and feel different almost every day.  I'm anxious; listening for names of children I know in the Creole list of the dead - not sure if it's the "Jean Pierre" I saw or one of the others.  Relieved, when the church banners and cloth are removed and I see the bodies on each stretcher are adult sized.  Or grieved when I see the name of the child I was worried about scrawled in blue sharpie across the label on their make-shift burial shroud.  On Monday, it was overwhelming with more deceased from over the weekend.  Numb on days it's too much to process and still go on working.  It's sad when there's few mourners and heartbreaking when you hear the cries of many.  Thankfully, I end up feeling peaceful and like we're providing a gentle send-off as we kneel together and hold out our hands with a benediction to the dead.  On Sunday, we had a candlelight Vespers service that traditionally has no funerals and renewed our spirits to start the week.  

We had our first days off this weekend and took a tour of Port-au-Prince with our driver and one of the day managers where we're staying.  They showed us a ruined cathedral, a newly built market, the site of the president's palace, and pointed out their own houses.  Signs of the earthquake were everywhere and they pointed out the changes we couldn't appreciate.  

Place of worship

Ruins of a cathedral

On Ben and Mahsa's last night, we had a beautiful dinner up on the mountainside overlooking the rest of the city.  It took over an hour and a half to get there with traffic but the view was worth it.  We were joined by Sister Judy (a nun who has worked in Haiti for years), Dr. Goutier (one of the Haitian staff), and Dr. Goutier's daughter and niece.  We spent 3 cool hours eating and chatting about life, medicine, and Haitian history.  

View during dinner

Well, dinner's finished.  We have to go wash our pans from cooking eggs, tuna and spinach, and heating up ramen (not all at the same time, ew).  The local cat, Scabio, has eaten most of the leftovers.  The rest of the night we'll shower off the day's sweat and deet, type up our cases, submit our blog posts, and keep in touch with our families.  

Scabio, the resident cat, hoping for more leftovers

A plutard (see you later), 

Abby