November 20, 2008--A Rainy Day in the Batey

Last night when I went to bed there were dark rain clouds on the horizon. I assumed it would pour for an hour or so at night, as it sometimes does, and be sunny the next day. But when I woke up in the middle of the night it was raining very lightly, and it continued this morning and throughout the day. This was the first day it had rained all day, and it was also the first day I had worn jeans in the community (yes, it was that cold!)
I took this opportunity to sleep in a little longer, and get caught up on some “documentation” of interviews and meetings that I had to do. I didn't feel too bad about staying in the house, because nobody else was leaving their houses either. The professors for the public school never arrived, and classes were cancelled in one of the after/before school programs. It's not that it was raining that hard, in fact, it was basically sprinkling all day, but since there are no paved roads, any time there is any water at all in the streets it makes them very muddy and difficult to get anywhere. So all day, everybody was in their house.
After I got done doing some work I came and sat with my family. The girls were doing some chores, my host mom was cooking and a neighbor who lives next door but comes over to eat with us (since he's not married and doesn't have a wife to cook for him) was sitting in the room as well. I decided this was the perfect time to start learning Kreyol, up until now I have only mastered how to say “How are you?” in Kreyol, but this alone charms all the old Haitian men who come and greet me. So I began asking our neighbor how to say certain things. He is a small, wirey though still strong man who came from Haiti forty years ago to work in the sugar cane fields. He now grows some food on a plot of land he has, and he always brings us bananas and plaintains to eat and sell to others. He is one of the ones who is particularly thrilled that I can say “I am good, how are you?” in Kreyol. So he started naming things around the room in Kreyol, and I went writing them down phonetically, since Kreyol is basically a phonetic language. My host mom would chime in every once in a while with a word as well. Soon I had two pages full of words, but remembered very few. Thanks to my French skills however, I was able to impress my family by counting in Kreyol (the numbers are basically the same as French).
When it finally stopped raining for a while I made a very slippery trek over to the health clinic. The clinic is run by the government and has a nurse and an intern (a student who has studied medicine in the university for 5 years and is now giving a year to the governmet) who live there during the week days and then leave and go back to their homes in the city during the weekends. Today the doctor was the only one in the clinic, so I got to sit down with her and do a little bit of interrogating about the health in the community. Some of the problems she sees most frequently have to do with parasites, dehydration of children (a result of vomiting and diahrrea, which is also related to parasites), diabetes, high blood pressure and a lack of folic acid in the older population. We also discussed the absence of family planning and the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the community. It was interesting to talk to her about what she has seen so far, and how important education is in preventing things such as parasites and dehydration.
I had been chatting with her for about an hour when four teenage boys came in carrying a seven year old who was crying. They explained that he had jumped off of a wall and cut his foot on a piece of zinc (tin). He foot was bleeding a lot, and so the kids laid him on the operating table and the doctor began to clean the wound and stitch it up. When she gave him the shot he started screaming and crying because he thought that the doctor was going to amputate his foot, which of course the teenage boys were telling him was going to happen. He tried to get off the table and the 4 boys and I had to use all of our strength to hold him down. We had to hold him there for a good six or seven minutes while she was stitching up his foot, and for about 5 minutes he was screaming and crying and yelling curse words that I only recently learned. When the doctor was about finished his parents came in. They didn't seem particularly worried or sympathetic; they just stood there and said, "I told you not to leave the house, now are you going to wear your shoes?" The doctor told them that they had to be sure and get him another tetanus shot (the clinic hasn't received the medicine from the government lately so the family has to take the 45 minute motorcycle ride to the nearest town to get it), and gave him some more medicine. Then one of the boys carried him to his house on his back.
I asked the doctor if she had to stitch up a lot of kids, and she said it happened very frequently, and once two boys came in together because they had been throwing rocks at each other and both needed stitches in their head. I must say, this community is certainly lucky that it has this clinic to patch them up when things like this happen!

**Note--three days letter I went to the little boy's house to check on him, he was already running around and in perfectly good shape, despite the fact he had three stitches!