Well March has been a month of traveling and splitting my time between Peace Corps activities and activities in my community. I had two especially fun trips this month that were very different but definitely both highlights of my time here so far:
1. Medical Mission!
In the beginning of March I went to work as a translator for a medical mission that came to a hospital near me to do plastic surgeries (the reconstructive kind, no implants or face lifts!) Peace Corps gets requests from various groups who come down here to do different surgeries for volunteers to serve as translators. The medical mission lasted six days; the first day we did intakes and the doctors assessed all the people who came, scheduling them if they were good candidates for surgery. Lots of the surgeries were scheduled for children who had cleft lips and palates, and most of the rest of the surgeries were for people who had bad scars from things such as fires and acid fights. Acid fights? Yup, we saw a lot of women who had gotten in fights and had acid thrown on them. These burns were especially deforming and many of the women who came in with them said they could not get jobs because nobody would hire someone who was deformed like that.
The rest of the week we were translating for the doctors as they were getting patients ready for surgery, coming out of surgery, and translating for family members and patients as they left the hospital. We also did quite a lot of translating between the doctors and the administration of the hospital we were working at. It was neat to be able to watch the surgeries and watch the entire process and also connect with patients and their families.
I also had a personally fulfilling experience that was kind of a follow up to when I worked in the hospital in Jimani after the earthquake. The day of consultations the doctors told me that a Haitian woman who had been an earthquake victim had been brought in. Since I speak a little Kreyol, they asked me to try to translate for this lady. We learned she had been brought in from another hospital across the country because she needed a skin graft on her leg and they couldn’t do it at the other hospital. We also learned she had been at that hospital ever since a couple days after the earthquake—almost two months! The doctors agreed to do her surgery the next day. So the next day I helped prepare her for surgery and explain what the doctors were going to do. She was very scared about the surgery, but everything went fine and she was allowed to stay in the hospital for as long as she needed to recoup. Given the conditions of a public hospital here in the DR and the fact that the women was alone, the doctors that I was working with were very concerned for her health (family members must stay with patients the whole time because the hospital does not provide caretakers to give them their food, take them to the bathroom, etc…) The doctors asked me if I could find someone to take care of this women while she was in the hospital, so I made a couple calls and a girl from my town and a Catholic missionary who lives in my town and used to live in Haiti came down to help. The girl ended up staying with the women almost the entire time she was in the hospital near us (two weeks), and the missionaries began to make preparations to take the woman back to Haiti.
This past weekend, the woman was brought back to Haiti by the missionaries, where I am told she had a tearful reunion with her family, who thought she was dead. After being in Jimani and having very little time to help patients individually and provide them some kind of social services, I was glad to have the opportunity during this medical mission to really help an individual who was affected by the earthquake.
2. Volleyball trip!
Of course, every time I go on a trip with my kids we have a great time. Two weeks ago, I arranged to take my volleyball team to a pueblo where another volunteer lives to have a mini tournament and stay overnight. I brought six girls, ages 12-15, and another team of six also came. We woke up early to take motorcycles out of my site. When we arrived to the bridge that we usually cross, it was being worked on, so we all had to load into a small rowboat and be rowed across the river to the other side where another motorcycle took us to the bus stop. As we were traveling on the bus, my girls were glued to the windows, peering out. One girl asked what every single town along the way was called. I realized that most of the girls had never been up this far north and had never seen these towns and cities. We arrived and played volleyball, ate, went to the river, and played more volleyball.
That night the girls ate together and then each one went with a girl from the pueblo to sleep in her house. The other girls on the other teams were mostly older than my girls, and at first I was worried that they wouldn’t integrate well. But by the end of the night when they were being sent off to their houses for the, they were all very comfortable, and I was not worried that they would be uncomfortable sleeping in a strange house.
The next morning my girls were the first players up and over at my friends’ house ready for breakfast. Three of them had been put in the same house and said they were treated so well: “The mother prepared our bathing water for us, gave us the biggest bed, and they even had a mosquito net!” It’s so easy to please these girls! All of the girls had positive experiences, and what they really loved was getting to know the neighborhood.
By the time the tournament was over, my girls had beat one team twice and lost to another team twice, but they certainly fought, considering they were the youngest ones there! I realized though that the most valuable experience for them was seeing a new town, seeing how people lived and worked there, and realizing that they too can get out of their town and progress.
We treated the girls to ice cream on the way home (some girls had never eaten at the chain that we went to) and then took another road back so we wouldn’t have to cross the river in the boat again. The girls arrived happy and incredibly tired, and of course all they have been asking me since is when we will go on another trip!
