The day of the January 12th earthquake was a significant day in my life, but it was not the day of greatest impact. That day happened three years earlier, and marked the beginning of my journey with Haiti and its children.
To tell the story of my most significant day in Haiti, I have to go back in time eight years. In the spring of 2003 my husband Ken, a United Methodist pastor, had been assigned to serve a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. We arrived in June and set about meeting the members and settling in. We quickly learned that the church had a thirty-year history of service in Haiti. The founders of The Haiti Mission effort were a couple by the name of Bill and Alice White. They began the mission after their first visit to Haiti in 1979. Stunned by the poverty, malnutrition and despair they saw, they returned home determined to do something to help. Bill was a gifted engineer and Alice, spurred on by the need for healthcare in Haiti, returned to school to become a nurse. Steadily over the next 30 years, with the help of many friends in the church and community, they dug wells, built churches, and most notably established a health clinic to serve the rural poor in northern Haiti. Today the clinic stays open year-round in that small village and over the years has seen and treated thousands of patients. Five weeks out of the year, teams of American doctors and nurses serve at the clinic for a one-week stint, supplementing the care given by the single Haitian physician who attends the clinic.
From the first summer we arrived in Charlotte, the Whites campaigned to get Ken and me to join a medical team for a week of work at the Tovar Clinic in the small rural village of the same name. Ken finally worked it into his schedule to go in January of 2005. I followed in October of 2006.
I must confess that I originally went to Haiti to be the supportive minister’s wife, not to have my life changed. Maybe I hoped to earn brownie points with our new parishioners. I’m not sure why I first signed up; perhaps it was the opportunity to see a different part of the world? The truth was, before I made the first trip, I didn’t know where Haiti was on a world map. I had never been to a Caribbean island – well, Puerto Rico, once, a long time ago – and had never even taken a cruise in the region. Now here I was, flying over those deep aqua-blue waters toward the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere in a fifteen-seat plane without a bathroom, the kind in which you have to stoop just to walk down the aisle toward your cramped seat.
When we landed on the northern coastline, in Haiti’s second-largest city of Cap Haitien, I was apprehensive and overwhelmed. I had been to other developing countries, been part of two work teams in Guatemala, but nothing in my past had prepared me for what I saw in my first fifteen-minute ride to our hotel. As we made our way to the waiting vehicles after retrieving our bags, I head the voices of Haitians saying, “One dollar. One dollar,” their hands thrust through the chain link fence near baggage claim, hoping to get lucky. The hungry learn this phrase and use it in hopes of receiving a one-dollar bill from the Americans who disembark at the terminal.
Once the vehicles were loaded, we wound our way through the streets. Sewage and garbage filled the alleyways; potholes in the roads were like craters, and crowds of people swarmed the streets as vendors hoped to sell their wares that day for daily bread. The dust and burning trash stung my nostrils, and the heat and humidity made my skin sticky with sweat almost immediately. I prided myself on not being the diva or prissy type and decided I would not complain. I’d suck it up and give my best to the team effort.
We arrived on Saturday morning, and over the weekend I was trained to take patients’ vital signs. I learned the proper way to use the electronic blood pressure cuff, and how to enter the information on a patient’s chart. On Monday, after a bumpy 1 ½ hour-long ride along dusty potholed roads, we arrived at the village clinic in Tovar. I began my new job as part of the intake team. The routine began: a name would be called by the interpreter, and I would receive that person’s chart. Soon a mother with a child would appear and sit before me. I would take the child’s temperature, weight, and list their age. By Wednesday I had memorized enough Creole that I could ask the child to open their mouth to receive the thermometer, ask their name and age, and request that they stand on the scales. “Compe su balance,” I would say in my North Carolina drawl.
Feeling overly confident at my progress by mid-week, I was unprepared for what happened next. I dropped the latest chart filled with ordinary numbers – 97.8 degrees, 35 pounds – onto the stack of patient files to be seen, when I turned to find a very small, very elderly woman standing before me unannounced. She reminded me of the pictures I had seen of Mother Teresa with her short stature, long dress, and draped headpiece which covered her ears and forehead and wrinkled face. She appeared to have what looked like a bundle of clothes or towels folded in her thin, spindly arms. In the next moment, her eyes met mine as she unfolded the towel; I saw two tiny eyes stare back at me from beneath the folds. I knew immediately it was an infant, and that the child was in trouble.
I don’t know how I knew this; perhaps it was a mother’s instinct, or maybe it was the sight of the child’s shriveled skin, like someone who stays in the bathtub too long… Or it might have been the eyes I saw staring back at me, not quite so clear or bright. In an instant, all my confidence flew out the window and I realized this was far beyond my taking a temperature and dropping a chart on a table for the next physician to take over. I quickly motioned for the woman to wait and ran to the pediatrician’s exam room. “You need to come quickly. There’s a woman with a baby and it looks really sick.” I was told to take the vitals, and the baby’s file was put on top of the stack, ahead of all others. The physicians and nurse practitioners took over. The baby weighed barely more than five pounds. Through an interpreter, they learned that she was three or four days old and had not been nursing.
Just as the towel had revealed the child, her story and that of her family began to unfold in the clinic. Her mother had become unexpectedly pregnant late in life. When her father suffered a life-threatening injury several months earlier, the family’s means to survive were severely compromised. He had been the breadwinner and now could not work. The entire family had gone hungry, and the new baby only increased the number of mouths to feed. Her mother had neither the physical nor emotional strength to even nurse. She had given up, lost hope. But the child’s grandmother had not. She had taken the child and walked many miles with the infant safely tucked in the folds of the towel to find help.
For several hours, the newborn lay on a folding table in the treatment room. A tiny, flexible tube the diameter of a disposable ink pen was threaded down her nose and throat, finally reaching the stomach. Nurses and volunteers took turns very, very slowly pushing syringes full of sugar water through the tube into the child’s stomach. I took my turn with the syringe as the nurse stood close by. We watched as the child’s eyes became clearer, her stare brighter and more focused. I distinctly remember the moment she curled her tiny fingers around one of my own.
The grandmother sat patiently and waited for the fluids to return her grandchild to life. She smiled as she realized the infant was being revived. At one point I told an interpreter to ask the grandmother the child’s name. The interpreter relayed her words. “Lovely. The child’s name is Lovely.” I turned my head as my eyes filled with tears. To see an otherwise healthy child so fragile and close to death for lack of fluids was depressing, to say the very least. To hear that the child was named Lovely was more than my heart could bear.
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| Baby Lovely in the Tovar Clinic |
A short time later Dr. Ray Ford, the director of the medical mission, made his way up into the hills with an interpreter and a driver. He found the family’s mud hut, and the child’s mother, whose despair had kept her from helping her baby thrive. They brought her back to the clinic. With encouragement, she eventually began to nurse the child.
For the remainder of my time in Haiti, I waited anxiously at the clinic each day to see if Baby Lovely would be brought in for a recheck. Had she gained weight? Would she make it? Would her mother find the strength to nurture her child in the face of such overwhelming need? Would Baby Lovely survive, or thrive? By week’s end, the child had come in twice and the scales showed only a tiny bit of progress. On Friday, as we watched the clinic disappear in the truck’s rearview mirror, I wondered if Baby Lovely would be alive the next year when I came to Tovar. All I could do was hope. “Please let Baby Lovely live!” I prayed. “Please let her live.”
Baby Lovely’s story is one that can be repeated many times over in Haiti. Hers are not the only eyes that grow dim and flicker. The infant mortality rate hovers around 60. I never knew what the phrase “infant mortality rate” meant, what 60 meant, until I read the statistics and description. An infant mortality number of 60 means that out of 1000 children born in Haiti, a country the size of Maryland, 60 will die before their first birthday. In America that number changes to six; six children in 1000 die before their first birthday. So your chances of dying in Haiti as an infant in the first year of life are tenfold what they would be if you were born in Cleveland or Atlanta, Boston or San Antonio.
Even more alarming was what happened if you followed those 1000 children through to their fifth birthday. Nearly one-third of them would no longer be eyes looking back at you. They would be gone. Gone.
When I read the statistics, I couldn’t believe that Haiti is only a two-hour plane ride from our shores. How can this be true? How can children so close to our shores be at such risk? What is wrong with our world that human life is so completely vulnerable in one place, yet life-saving solutions are so close yet so far?
If Baby Lovely had the statistical deck stacked against her, her mother was equally disadvantaged toward survival. Her chances of survival while giving birth were perhaps part of the problem. For mothers giving birth in Haiti from 2005-2008, the rate of maternal mortality ratio – the annual number of deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births – was around 640. The chances of a mother having a physician, nurse or midwife present for the birth of her child are a mere 25 in 1000. With mothers at such a disadvantage, is it any wonder that so many children die?
It is the scarcity of healthcare in Haiti that makes these numbers so high, and makes it possible for so many lives to be lost. In the presence of Baby Lovely, the larger statistics of Haiti’s children were replaced for me by the reality of this single set of tiny eyes and curling fingers. What would be her fate? Would she be one of the sixty that died that year, or the one-third that no longer existed in five years? What about this one?
That is the day that I remember most from all my days in Haiti. That was the day I recognized the precarious nature of a child’s life in a country only a two-hour flight from the Florida coastline. It was the day I realized how despair puts not only us at risk, but those for whom we are responsible; you must put one foot in front of the other, or die. It was the day I saw how precious the life of a child is to a loved one, like Baby Lovely’s grandmother. She held love that kept her walking toward the clinic in the heat of the day despite her hunger, hoping her legacy would survive. It kept her walking toward hope, toward healing.
It was also the day I realized that one person can make a difference. This is such a trite phrase, that the realization of its truth can be easily missed. As I watched Baby Lovely begin to revive on the clinic table I asked myself: What if Bill and Alice White had returned from Haiti, looked at each other, and said “What can one person really do?” Most of us say this to excuse ourselves from doing anything, and we let the enormity of a problem crush any solution we might imagine.
Instead of asking this question, the Whites made a declaration: “We have to do something!” And they did. They tried things. Some failed, so they tried other things, and they learned. They kept at it until a clinic was established to serve the rural people of Tovar, a clinic that has helped thousands. One day, when I happened to be there, it served a grandmother and her grandbaby named Lovely. What one person did mattered; I could see that now. Baby Lovely’s were not the only eyes that had become clear and bright. I recognized that what one woman and one man had done to begin this medical mission and what many had done to sustain it. It had meant a new life for this child, and many more I had never seen. One person’s actions have a real impact on a child’s life.
Ti moun se riches! I wrote in my previous post. Our children are our treasures.
If children are our treasures, then our actions should reflect that belief. This had been true for Alice and Bill White. I left my first trip to Haiti asking myself how my life could make that kind of difference.
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