coolness of laplis

yesterday, just before i left the clinic, doctor baptiste pulled me aside. he said he was planning to arrive at 8am this morning for a "minor surgery" and i was welcome to come assist or i could meet him to see the rest of the patients at 9am. I told him I'd see him at 8. (disclaimer: if you don't like hearing about blood and guts, skip down to the sentence that says, "what a day in the clinic" and read from there :-)

the "minor surgery" was a lipoma (benign tumor comprised of fatty tissue) the size of a softball on the back of this man's head. so, we got to work. we prepped the area and sterilized as much as possible (the sterilization here is a whole different story). dr. baptiste numbed the area locally with lidocaine and then made his first incision. i held the skin up with tweezers and tried to dab as much blood as possible away from his work. i held the clamps when he finally found the artery that was causing said blood flow. the tissue, while soft, was very dense and it took a lot of cutting and chopping to get it into managable lumps to extract. when dr. jacob was finished with an area, he would tell me to "pass my finger through" the wound to feel if there was additional pieces of the tumor that he left behind. you may think me sick, but this was so freaking cool. i found a few and figured out the creole words for needle, sutures, clamps, and tweezers. gauze and lidocaine are thankfully the same in both languages.

the interesting part came when we were about halfway through the surgery and the electricity went out. this mean that there was much less light and all the fans quit circulating the precious air. it teetered around 105 degrees outside with the breeze, so i don't even want to know what it was in the crowded clinic. we were sweating bullets and trying to work as fast as possible. the wound began to bleed profusely because dr. baptiste nicked another artery deep enough so as to prevent further clamping. so we packed the wound with gauze, hoping the compression would stop the bleeding long enough for us to finish. this allowed us a short break just as i was beginning to get tunnel vision. i felt like i was in an episode of M*A*S*H.

this man was the perfect patient. he let dr. baptiste know when the anesthetic was wearing off and i would prep the needle for him to insert - as we're 2 inches deep into his head, nonetheless. all in all, it took us about 3 hours to perform what dr. baptiste thought would be a 45 minute procedure. dr. baptiste sutured him up (not before telling me that next time it would be my turn to suture), we put a compression bandage on him and sent him home with antibiotics. father marc took some photos of the surgery, so if you're extra curious, feel free to check out his blog (http://pwojeespwa.blogspot.com/) in the next few days. i've still yet to figure out a way to upload photos, but his blog is chock full of them!

after lunch, i came back to see more patients with dr. jacob. we saw lots of babies with fungal skin infections from contaminated water and poor hygiene. we saw older people with anemia, malaria, high blood pressure. we saw children with parasitic stomach infections and respiratory infections. the last patient of the day was the most heartbreaking. she is 41 and her youngest child is 6 years old. dr. baptiste diagnosed her with a skin infection and noted that she had suffered from a variety of skin infections previously and complained of aches and pains all over. he told her he would like to do a rapid HIV test and she complied. the test read positive which means that not only does she have HIV, but her child probably does as well. the good news - if there is good news at this point - is that there are free HIV counseling, prescription, and clinical services in the nearby town of  les cayes.

what a day in the clinic.

i came back to the quad just in time to see a huge performance done by the kids for the large group of visitors. they called it a spectack and it included haitian hip-hop numbers as well as traditional folks dances and songs. it was simply amazing. the drumming was astounding and the way the kids knew exactly how to dance to the beat of the drums and when to chant acapella-style was incredible.

i've been trying to make friends with the little girls here because the recent events and the lack of 'school-like structure' have slowed my attempt at an all girls group. so, there was an itty-bitty girl standing next to me and i knew she couldn't see the show because she barely came up to my knee. so i held my hands out and said, "ou we li?" which i think means, "you see it?" even at her age, she probably speaks better creole than me, but she grinned and jumped into my arms anyway. i was thinking, it's hot and i'm sure she'll squirm away soon. but oh no. that little thing played with my hair and danced in my arms and after a couple of hip-switches and 4 more songs, she even tried to come home with me. so, if you see a small haitian child in richmond this fall, you'll know how to connect the dots.

this evening, just before dark, i decided to walk to the basketball hoop and check out a potential running route for the mornings. so pretty soon i was trailing 5 small children and 4 more were running behind me to catch up, all headed for the court. we watched the boys play basketball (one of the catholic boys here is a 6'6" basketball coach in southern california, so he was having a hay-day). and the haitian boys were still beating him, 1 foot shorter and 2 shoes less.

i was sitting on the sidelines with the younger ones when you hear the familiar "shhhh" sound. we literally saw the rain crossing the valley at the foot of the mountains. all of the children got up and started shouting, "laplis! laplis!" (rain! rain!) and we ran as fast as we could away from the approaching storm. we ran through the mango trees and down the dirt path. through the cow pasture and quanset hut where the children eat their meals. just about then, we began to feel the drops. pretty soon we were drenched and running through mud, shoeless and careless.

so, yeah, i think that's a good way to describe today. running through a lot of mud, but feeling the coolness of the rain anyway.