Friday, May 08, 2009

What is there to say?


My better half has been in Haiti for two weeks now. He is working at a clinic in Cite Soleil. John has sent some heart-wrenching pictures. The poverty seems particularly intense. Everyday events, like a rainfall, create huge public health problems as people's homes fill with water and mud.

John has diagnosed a few new heart patients--a baby and toddlers who have heart murmurs likely indicating a congenital defect. He has sent them to a cardiologist in Port-au-Prince who will do an echocardiogram. John will get a written report and a videocassette of the echo that he will use when he presents these childrens to medical centers and doctors in the United States.

In the meantime, almost all of the patients he is seeing suffer from the far less--in some ways--medically complex problems of not enough food and too much dirty water. We need to keep working and praying for the political will of the people of the world to make this unacceptable.

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