By Sokari Ekine | With thanks to BlackLooks
Tuesday, June 11, 2013.
Recently
I passed through the high security zones of Petion-Ville and Delmas on
my way to Cite Soleil (CS) where policing is limited to the
neighbourhood parameters. It’s very possible I was missing something and
the police were hiding at the ready as the tap-tap driver complained
that he did not like coming to CS because there were bad people here.
Unfortunately with my limited Kreyol I could not understand the reason
for his nervousness. I had gone to visit with Dr Carroll at the
pediatric clinic at the ‘House of the Sisters’
* where he has worked for many years. The clinic is set in a large
tranquil compound with a school, a sewing training center for women and a
nutrition center for underweight babies to attend with their mothers.
There are two security guards at the entrance but thankfully they are
not armed. As usual the shaded courtyard was filled with mothers,
babies and toddlers. Many more waited patiently inside in the large
airy waiting room.
It
was already 11am and Dr John’s morning clinic had been running for a
few hours. I opened the door hesitantly and entered. He immediately
greeted me and began to tell me about an 11-month old baby Willgesta Pierre, who needs hole in the heart surgery. And there was a previous patient, baby Elie Joseph
who at the time was living in the one of the worst camps in PAP,
Aviation City - a shameful reminder of the assault on human dignity and
the failures of post earthquake humanitarianism. Baby Elie needed
similar treatment but died after his mother failed to get her passport
to the Dominican Republic for the operation. Dr Carroll described
Elie’s death as a series of failures including his own
Big
mistakes plus little mistakes plus big negligence plus little
negligence all add together and equal death. Just because his parents
don’t know how it all works, doesn’t mean people aren’t at fault. And we
are all failing the hundreds of thousands of innocents living in the
tents now. There is no urgency for the poor. There never has been.
I
imagine Elie’s death was foremost in Carroll’s eyes and the need to
ensure that baby Willgesta did not die through a similar set of
failures. Repairing a hole in the heart (ventricular septal defect) is
just a 15 minute operation but it requires sophisticated medical
technology to keep the blood pumping whilst the heart is being repaired,
high medical expertise in a specialist pediatric heart surgeon, and
reliable electricity, a combination not present in Haiti at this time.
Willgesta was admitted to hospital in April but needs her surgery
quickly. Already the pressure is building up around her lungs and if
this continues she will need both lung and heart replacement which is
not going to happen. So now he has to sell the surgery to his local
hospital in the US, find a surgeon willing to operate for free - this is
the easiest of his tasks - and get visas for baby and mother all in the
next few weeks. In his words, there is absolutely no excuse for this
baby to die – ZERO!
One
of the biggest problems in providing appropriate and timely treatment
is clinic hopping Patients go from one clinic to the next often
without a clear knowledge of the diagnosis and or forgetting the
treatment they received. The lack of documentation is time-wasting and
patients are retreated for the same problems whereas with documentation
the doctor would be able to see a particular patient has repeated
problem and look for an underlying problem. Willgesta is an example of
this. She has been to five clinics and all she she has to show is a
bag full of payment receipts but nothing has been done for her daughter.
Now she is critical with fever and sweats and worse, possibly TB which
is rampant throughout Haiti. How does one begin to understand any of
this when the struggle to pay for doctors is pitted against the struggle
to eat. Three, four hours spent traveling from clinic to clinic, each
time waiting in hope that someone will care enough to do something.
Earlier
I mentioned that the root cause of illness amongst Cite Soleil’s
residents is structural violence – those social conditions which
determine ‘who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm‘
and their discriminatory affects. [Paul Farmer**]. Lets take as one
example the cost of maintaining the 2012-13 UN occupiers which is
$648,394,000. In contrast the World Bank
just announced $70 million for maternal and child health in Haiti. We
are told that 1.8 million women, children and vulnerable families will
benefit though we are not told the quality and quantity of that benefit
and more importantly how much of that money will go towards operational
and staff costs? But its deeper than that as whilst any improvement
in the access and use of health services is of course a positive step,
the real cause of illness in Cite Soleil and elsewhere, is due in large
to living conditions and since the World Bank money will not be used to
improve these in any way, then the programme ends up as a bandaid used
to cover a bullet wound.
* The Rosalie Rendu Pediatric Clinic in Cite Soleil (main picture) is run by the Daughters of Charity. The Daughters are Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul.
Sokari Ekine is a human rights activist, writer and award-winning blogger. She blogs at http://Blacklooks.org