Dear Family and Friends:
In two weeks I return to Arizona with Jeanne, after she
visits Leogane for ten days and we take a day trip to Jacmel. Already, I’m thinking about which manje I’ll no longer be eating in salamanje a nan Hopital Sainte Croix
(“HSC”) Guesthouse, and what I won’t be buying from a street vendor. I won’t, however, have to wait until this
coming October, when I’m back for another month as the guesthouse manager, before
having another piece of toast with manba
pike. I’m bringing two jars home
with me.
I often tell guests that we have the best restaurant in
Leogane, though I’ve heard that Ocean Grill - at the junction for the bypass
road to Leogane City Center and the highway to Jacmel – is a good place for
grilled fish. In my humble opinion,
there is great food (tre bon manje)
at the guesthouse, and that’s because of Jeannine and her assistants; Yvette,
Geralda and Lozina. All four are working
for most of this month, while three different groups from the States are here
over a three week period.
Bobby Cruse also eats here. He is the construction manager for the U.S. architect, Jimmy Hite, who
designed a number of construction projects for the Episcopal Diocese of
Haiti. Bobby is monitoring the
completion of the HSC renovations and new construction at the Episcopal Nursing
School, which is less than two miles away in the Belval neighborhood of Leogane
Communale. He’s been living at the
guesthouse since February, and may stay another six months. Every six weeks or so, Bobby returns to North
Carolina for a two week visit with his wife and children. He will be Dr. L’s new guesthouse BFF when I
leave, at least until Missy takes him, the cat, home with her to North Carolina
in August.
While Jeannine is the “head cook,” she does much more than
run kwizin nan. She is
the glue that holds the guesthouse together. Often upon their return, veteran guests seek out Jeannine to of course get
a preview of the week’s menu but, more importantly, to see their friend. Jeannine not only takes great pride in having
the best place in town to eat, she makes sure
guesthouse managers like me don’t mess things up too much. That’s Jeannine in the kitchen this past
Wednesday morning. Photo 0757)
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| Jeannine |
When mobile clinic teams and other guests stay here, meals
are served in salamanje a on a set
schedule; manje maten at 7:00 a.m., manje midi at Noon, and manje aswe at 6:00 p.m.
Because there is not a “the” before some of the nouns in
paragraphs above, you may be wondering whether there are some typos in this
Note, or I should say more mistakes than the usual number I overlook before I
hit “Send.” The Kreyol words “la”, “nan” and “a” can, at
times, mean “the” and usually they
follow the noun. For example, “the
dining room” is “salamanje a” and
“the kitchen” is “kwizin nan.”
I’m sure by now you’re keyed into the fact that “manje” can be either the verb “eat” or
the noun “food”. You wouldn’t
necessarily pick up on “fe manje” being
the verb form for “to cook” or “cooking, “ as in “Mwen ap fe manje manje aswe” – “I’m cooking dinner.” “Mwen ap manje manje maten” is what I usually
say on the phone to let someone know “I’m eating breakfast,” but this coming October
I should be saying “M’ap manje manje maten,” after mastering the contraction of “Mwen ap”
to “M’ap.” “Mwen”
is “I”, “me”, “my” or “mine.”
Some of My Favorite Foods
My two stints at the HSC Guesthouse have given me 4 ½ months
to enjoy great home style cooking. Almost
nothing comes from a can or jar; except for such things as bottles of hot sauce
and catsup, coffee creamer, grape jelly, and the soy sauce I bought a few weeks
ago at the new “Original Market” to sometimes put on white rice/diri blan. No frozen foods used here.
At one or two meals every day, a pitcher of fresh juice is
served. It could be cherry juic /ji
seriz, watermelon juice/ji melon dlo,
mango juice/ji mango, lime juice/ji sitwon vet, or pineapple juice/ji anana. At last Thursday’s
lunch/manje midi, I tried fresh
soursop juic/ji kowosol for the first time, but not the last. I would liken its taste to a combination of
2/3 fresh coconut juice and 1/3 fresh lime juice. For two days last week, Watson acted as a translator for the
group staying here. He thinks soursop
juice tastes better when one part milk is added to three parts juice.
There is too much variety in the meals served here for me to
cover a full week’s menu, but I can describe some of my favorites. For main dishes, it’s a tie between turkey/kodenn chunks in spicy red sauce and a pumpkin
or squash based Haitian soup, soup joumou. A number of guests would vote otherwise were
I to ask for their favorites, but they’re not here right now. I
will concede, however, that many guesthouse veterans request that Jeannine serve
her “three cheese meat lasagna” sometime during the week, which she did this
past Tuesday.
One reason I like the turkey chunks is that the spicy red
sauce somehow makes them taste like beef, but they’re healthier. Here the turkey simmers in one version of
Haitian Ti Malice sauce. (Haitian folklore figure Ti Malice, and also
Bouki, were introduced to you in Note 21.)
Sos Ti Malice is spicy, but
not too much so. In fact, I wish the
version we ate had more kick to it, but most visitors prefer it toned-down.
One of the many folk stories that attempt to explain the
origin of Ti Malice sauce is:
“Two men, Ti Malice and Bouki, are good friends. Ti Malice has meat for lunch every day and
Bouki just so happens to show up at Ti Malice’s house every day around lunch
time. Haitians, being good natured,
offer whatever they are eating to their guests. So Bouki winds up sharing Ti Malice’s meat every day. One day, Ti Malice decides to trick Bouki and prepares a very
hot sauce for the meat, hoping to deter Bouki from coming back at lunch time to
eat his food. Bouki tastes the meat with
the hot sauce on it and runs all over town shouting to everyone, ‘Come taste
the sauce Ti Malice made for me’, and that’s how Sauce Ti Malice got its name.” (Source - Taste Haiti)
The spicy red sauce prepared here often includes onions and
carrot slices with thin jalapeno pepper shavings. It’s the bomb. It is almost magical the way it transforms the
taste of the poultry. At least here, turkey
chunks in spicy red sauce is almost always served with rice / diri; sometimes white rice, sometimes
brown rice with a few brown conga beans added.
At
the HSC Guesthouse, Haitian Pumpkin or Squash Soup is most often served for
lunch / manje midi. Last
Friday, Jeannine made my day by serving soup
joumou for the send-off lunch for the group leaving for Port-au-Prince that
afternoon. (Friday’s bowl of soup joumou, after several servings, and
other dishes, are shown in Photos 0797 and 0799.)
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| 0799 |
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| 0797 |
One
of the many recipes I found online is:
Haitian
Pumpkin Soup - Soup Joumou (pronounced joo-moo)
Submitted by: MADANPAS
This savory soup is served in all Haitian households on the Haitian New Years Day
national holiday in commemoration of
Independence day. It was on January first, 1804, that Haiti became the world's
first independent black republic by defeating the French.
Minutes to Prepare: 30
Minutes to Cook: 150
Number of Servings: 10
Ingredients
Beef marinate made by crushing 4 garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon
thyme 1/4 teaspoon pepper, shallot and 2 sliced scallions and 2 teaspoons of
salt
1-pound piece of beef stew meat
10 cups water (add more later if necessary to make soup less thick)
1 whole scotch bonnet pepper with stem
2 pounds pumpkin (or winter squash / butternut), peeled and chopped (2 packages
frozen squash will also do)
2 carrots peeled and sliced
2 stalks celery sliced lengthwise and cut into pieces
5 parsley sprigs
1 large onion cubed
2 medium turnips peeled and cubed
2 medium potatoes peeled and cubed
1 pound cabbage sliced fine and chopped
1/4 pound vermicelli or other thin pasta, broken into shorter lengths
2 limes juiced
1/4 can tomato paste (for browning meat)
1/2 cup or 1 can tomato sauce
1 low sodium beef bouillon cube (if you'd like more flavor)
Directions
1.In a medium pot, cook pumpkin over
medium heat in 6 cups water for 30 minutes. Puree pumpkin in the water. While pumpkin is cooking, clean meat with lime, rinse with hot water and drain.
Marinate meat with meat rub. Rub the meat with the spice paste-scallions,
onion, thyme, garlic, shallot, green pepper, salt and black pepper ground
together. (For an enhanced flavor, you can in advance marinate the meat from 1
hour up to one day.)
2. In stockpot, add the meat with the oil and tomato paste and brown by adding
small amounts of water to caramelize the meat. Cook covered over medium heat
for 20 minutes. Add 3 cups water and pureed pumpkin and bring to a boil.
3. Add the cabbage, carrots, celery, onion, turnips, tomato sauce, potato and
parsley to the soup, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour
with a whole scotch bonnet on top. (The whole scotch bonnet is for flavoring
not to make the soup "hot". Remember to find and remove the pepper as
you stir the soup and remove it before it bursts)
6. Add the spaghetti broken in to short pieces and cook until soft and tender.
7. Taste and add a minimal amount of salt, black pepper or hot pepper to taste.
8. Turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let sit until ready to serve.
Makes 10 1-cup servings.
Fair Warning for All Members of St. Anthony on the Desert
I plan on trying to prepare soup joumou for one of next year’s
Wednesday Lenten Meals in the Parish Hall.
At the HSC Guesthouse, soup joumou usually is made vegetarian
style, with beef or chicken pieces on the side to be added as desired to your
bowl. As on last Friday, sometimes goat
pieces are served with the soup. Small
pieces of toast are served for dipping in the soup.
For my favorite side dishes, nothing comes close to pikliz, a spicy cole slaw type salad made
with thinly sliced cabbage and carrots, and jalapeno chili shavings. After this mix is marinated in vinegar, it is
left to dry somewhat, sometimes in the refrigerator. No mustard, mayonnaise or Miracle Whip is
used, so it’s light and has a kick, enough so that some guests give it a try
only once in a while. Others are devotees
like me. More conservative gourmets prefer
lettuce and tomatoes, or tomatoes, cucumbers and water crest, or a few
variations of combinations of cooked celery, cabbage, carrots, turnips and/or
turnips that are cooled in the refrigerator before the meal. I could eat pikliz
just about every day. I do eat mango
everyday. Papaya/ papay is served two or three
times a week.
I can’t imagine finding a store back home with mango that
comes anywhere near the taste of what you get in Haiti, at least when mango is in
season; which is right now. Early last
July tough, I did give it a try.The
next time you go to a market that is known for its produce, check out the price
for just one mango.This week, Jeannine
paid 50 gourdes ($1.25 USD) for six mango.That is less than the price for one mango in the U.S. But then again, in Leogane, when I bought six
large plastic bottles of Clorox in early May, 2011 for the clean-up of one of
the hospital’s operating rooms, after the invasion of muddy flood waters
through three entry points, each bottle cost $6.50 USD.
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| 0779 |
Third place on my list of main dishes is any of the chicken/poul dishes served in a variety of sauces. It’s rare that we have anything other than chicken legs for a poul meal. It boils down to cost. As in the U.S., chicken legs are one of the
least expensive cuts of chicken that Jeannine can buy, whether she’s in Leogane
or Port-au-Prince. Because we pretty
much only eat legs for our chicken dishes, we sometimes tell Jeannine that
“there must be a lot of live chicken breasts hopping from the main market down
Rue La Croix to the hospital.”
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| 0781 |
To give you a flavor for the dinners served when teams are visiting from the U.S., Photos 0779 and 0781 are of last Wednesday night’s meal. Photos 0789, 0791, 0793, 0794 (pikliz) and 0795 are of last Thursday’s dinner with a nice presentment of the pwason head and tail. It’s no accident that there were more dishes served on Thursday night, the last night this group was in town.
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| 0789 |
The staff traditionally serves the biggest dinner spread on the last night of a group’s stay at the guesthouse, which for most mobile clinic teams is Friday night.
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| 0791 |
Lunches are more modest. Last Thursday’s manje midi was
pigs in a blanket, bread / pen for manba, mango and soursop juice. At breakfast, I usually eat 3-4 chunks of pineapple or mango
and a piece of bread with peanut butter/manba. Jeannine sells her manba pike for $5 U.S. a jar.The pike comes from the
jalapeno bits Jeannine adds to the scratch peanut butter. Jeannine’s manba pike has a following in Leogane beyond HSC guests.
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| 0793 |
Two weeks ago, two American nurses dropped by
around 11 a.m. on Tuesday to order five jars to be picked up the next day,
even though they were staying in Belval for the week.
It was a real treat for me to watch the “all hands on deck”
operation that went into high gear right after Tuesday’s lunch. Typanol and Madame Bellevue were taking the
skins off the raw, shelled peanuts
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| 0794 |
Jeannine bought not too far from the
hospital. Geralda and Yvette chipped in
to grind the whole peanuts into almost a peanut powder. Jeannine of course was the master mixer the
next morning. She handled the “butter
consistency phase” and added the required measure of the jalapeno kicker. Jeannine of course shared part of the profits
with her co-workers from the five jar order.
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| 0795 |
Needless to say, I’m amazed that last year I returned to
Arizona almost 30 lbs. lighter after working for three months in the best
restaurant in Leogane. I’m not
experiencing anywhere near the same “per week” belt tightening this time
around. Dang!
The meals are more Spartan for me and Bobby when a team is
not spending the week with us. If it’s
just the two of us, there is only one cook working with Jeannine that
week. (Jeannine is a full-time salaried employee
of the hospital, as are Typanol and Madame Bellevue. The kitchen assistants are paid only when
they work in the kitchen during an assigned week.)
Bobby and I try to use the “off-weeks” to let the kitchen staff
catch-up on their sleep. When teams are here, the kitchen is busy from 5:45
a.m. until as late as 7:30 p.m. When it’s
just the two of us, a few hard boiled eggs and mango chucks are left in the
refrigerator at night for the next morning’s breakfast. Around 7 a.m. I’ll pop a few slices of
bread in the toaster and knock on Bobby’s door and say “manje maten fini” or sometimes “breakfast is ready.” My contribution of pressing down two toaster
buttons is payback for Bobby, the early riser, plugging in the coffee pot around 4:45
a.m.
For lunch, Bobby and I might have some pineapple chucks and either
fresh egg salad or fish salad sandwiches, though we spread it on one slice of
bread at a time. I almost called it
“tuna salad,” but it’s not. It’s made from
the left over fish from a dinner earlier in the week. Another common lunch would be spaghetti,
usually with tomato sauce, but there are times when no sauce is served, so we
are left with a choice between catsup and hot sauce. There also may be fresh pineapple or mango
chucks. A typical dinner for the two of
us would have chicken legs, fish chunks or goat pieces in a sauce, with rice and
some type of salad.
When Bobby was in North Carolina in April for three weeks, there
were no groups here for two of those weeks. I skipped breakfast, just had a banana for lunch, and had a 2-3 dish
dinner with small portions. I may have
lost a few pounds then.
The mobile clinic teams are served a robust dinner because
they are rather hungry after a 7:30 a.m.–6 p.m. day in the field. At times, a larger medical/dental group
could see as many as 140 patients in a day. Their sack lunch is a P & J sandwich and fig. We don’t serve figs with
the sack lunch. “Fig” is Kreyol for “banana,” while “bannann” is Kreyol for “plantain,” a very popular banana sibling or
cousin in Haiti.
You may be looking at some of the dinner photos and wondering
how a smaller group of 6–8, plus me
and Bobby, could eat all that food. While
some of the larger groups will devour every morsel, others leave leftovers. But, nothing is wasted.
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| 0758 |
Sometimes, when they have worked late, the kitchen staff may
take food home with them. Other times,
when there is less remaining, it may be left in the refrigerator and offered
to Typanol and/or Madame Bellevue in the
morning. Otherwise, Typanol pretty much
eats boiled breadfruit for breakfast every day. Or, we might offer some late dinner to the night
security guard in the hospital lobby or the night shift maintenance/
operations worker. I’ve been told that from time to time, when Bob and Robin have
been the guesthouse managers for three months before me, Robin has taken food
across the street to Madame Carmen, who is in her 80s. (Photo 0758)
Bones are rarely thrown away. They may find their way to someone’s soup pot if there is some meat left
on the bone, or otherwise they may be given to someone’s animal. This is not a country where many people are
inclined to pile too much food on to their plate to begin their meal, to then throw
an unconsumed fist full of food down the drain. When too many people go to bed hungry each night, it’s difficult for
needless waste of food to get a foot hold here.
Cheap Rice, Super Bowl XLV and Unintended Consequences of Well Intended Acts
On Saturday market day, you’ll see 25, 50 and 100 pound bags
of rice being transported around Leogane and Port-au-Prince on tap taps, motos or
one of the large man-powered wooden carts.Most often the rice will have been
produced in the U.S.A., in such states as Arkansas and Louisiana. This reflects a dramatic decrease in Haiti’s
production of rice for its own citizens over the past 25-30 years.
As reported in one publication, “[u]p until the 1980s,
Haitian rice farmers produced the great majority of the rice consumed in
Haiti. This situation, which changed
rapidly in the mid-1980s, intensified dramatically in the mid-1990s. During this period, total rice consumption
increased in response to population
growth which was to be expected. Also
during this period, the percentage of rice imports consumed increased and
overshot domestically produced rice in the mid-1990s. U.S. rice imports, which are called ‘Miami
rice’ (because rice, like most U.S. exports to Haiti are shipped from the major
port in Miami, Florida), now make up the majority of all rice consumption in
Haiti.”
As reported after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, former
President Bill Clinton acknowledged that his administration did not anticipate the
adverse consequences that would accompany the lowering of Haitian rice import tariffs
to promote lower prices. As reported in
March 2010:
“PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti.
– The earthquake not only smashed markets, collapsed warehouses and left
more than 2.5 million without enough to eat.
It may also have shaken up the way the developing world gets food. Decades of inexpensive imports – especially rice from the
U.S. – punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local
agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed
themselves.
While those policies have been criticized for years in aid
worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the
first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti
and elsewhere. They’re led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton – now U.N.
envoy to Haiti – who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that
destroyed Haiti’s rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to
dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.
‘It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas,
but it has not worked. It was a mistake,’
Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. ‘I had to live everyday with the consequences
of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people
because of what I did; nobody else.’
Clinton and former President George H. W. Bush, who are
spearheading U.S. fundraising for Haiti, arrive Monday in Port-au-Prince. Then comes a key donors’ conference on March
31 at the United Nations in New York. Those opportunities present the country with its best chance
in decades to build long-term food production, and could provide a model for
other developing countries struggling to feed themselves.
‘A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have . . .
resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed,”
U.S. humanitarian chief John Holmes told The Associated Press. ‘That’s a global
phenomenon, but Haiti’s a prime example. I think this is where we should
start.’ “
(End of article)
We all know that after the January 12, 2010 earthquake thousands
of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals came to Haiti from many
parts of the world to provide critically needed trauma care to hundreds of
thousands of patients, many of whom suffered single or multiple limb
amputations. Many charitable organizations rushed temporary shelters to
areas near the Quake’s epicenter, which was equidistant between Leogane and
Port-au-Prince. Massive supplies of food
and water were needed.
At the same time this essential humanitarian effort was arriving
in Haiti in early 2010, I’m sure well-meaning church, service clubs and school
organizations were collecting clothing. Much of these donations were needed on an interim basis; perhaps for
example disposable diapers for infants living in tent cities where there were few,
if any, clothes washing stations. But,
on a long-term basis, used clothing sent to Haiti can undermine local garment
micro-businesses so important to lifting women out of abject poverty. The following article provides some insight
into this complex issue.
The West can (and should) stop dumping its hand-me-downs on the developing
world.
The Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super
Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas. In parts of the developing world, however, an
alternate reality exists: "Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl XLV
Champions" appears emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The
shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of Steelers die-hards,
but recipients of the many thousands of excess shirts the National Football
League produced to anticipate the post-game merchandising frenzy. Each year,
the NFL donates the losing team's shirts to the charity World Vision, which
then ships them off to developing countries to be handed out for free.
Everyone wins, right? The NFL offloads 100,000 shirts (and hats and
sweatshirts) that can't be sold -- and takes the donation as a tax break. World
Vision gets clothes to distribute at no cost. And some Nicaraguans and Zambians
get a free shirt. What's not to like?
Quite a lot, as it happens -- so much so that there's even a Twitter
hashtag,
#SWEDOW, for "Stuff We Don't Want," to
track such developed-world offloading, whether it's knit teddy bears for kids
in refugee camps, handmade puppets for orphans, yoga mats for Haiti, or dresses
made out of pillowcases for African children. The blog
Tales
from the Hood, run by an anonymous aid worker, even set up a
SWEDOW
prize, won by Knickers 4 Africa, a (thankfully now defunct) British NGO set
up a couple of years ago to send panties south of the Sahara.
Here's the trouble with dumping stuff we don't want on people in need: What
they need is rarely the stuff we don't want. And even when they do need that
kind of stuff, there are much better ways for them to get it than for a Western
NGO to gather donations at a suburban warehouse, and send everything off to
Africa or South America, and then try to distribute it to remote areas. World
Vision, for example, spends 58 cents per shirt on shipping, warehousing, and
distributing them, according to data
reported
by the blog
Aid Watch -- well within the range of what a secondhand
shirt costs in a developing country. Bringing in shirts from outside also hurts
the local economy: Garth Frazer of the University of Toronto
estimates
that increased used-clothing imports accounted for about half of the decline in
apparel industry employment in Africa between 1981 and 2000. Want to really
help a Zambian? Give him a shirt made in Zambia.
Bottom line: Donations of cash are nearly always more effective. Even if
there are good reasons to give stuff rather than money, in most cases the stuff
can be bought locally. Economist Amartya Sen, for example, has
conclusively
shown that people rarely die of starvation or malnutrition because of a
lack of food in the neighborhood or the country. Rather, it is because they can
't
afford to buy the food that
's available. Yet, as Connie Veillette of the
Center for Global Development
reports,
shipping U.S. food abroad in response to humanitarian disasters is so
cumbersome it takes four to six months to get there after the crisis begins.
Buying food locally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found, would
be 25 percent cheaper and considerably faster, too.
In some cases, if there really is a local shortage and the goods really are
needed urgently, the short-term good done by clothing or food aid may well
outweigh any long-term costs in terms of local development. But if people
donate SWEDOW, they may be less likely to give much-needed cash. A
study
by Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan, for example, suggests that
charitable giving may be lower among consumers who buy cause-related products
because they feel they've already done their part.
Philanthrocapitalism may be
chic: The company Toms Shoes has met with considerable commercial success
selling cheap footwear with the added hook that for each pair you buy, the
company gives a pair to a kid in the developing world (it's sold more than a
million pairs to date). But
what if consumers are buying Toms instead of donating to charity, as some
surely are? Much better to stop giving them the stuff we don't want -- and
start giving them the money they do. (End of Charles Kenny article)
I apologize if I seem too harsh here. There is no question that many people living outside Haiti have good intentions that we all commend, when
they have become part of a charitable effort that nonetheless has unintended
adverse consequences for the very people the good works are supposed to
help.
Indeed, many, many people have traveled to Haiti, before and after the
Quake, to provide essential charitable medical infrastructure not yet made
available through the Haitian government. Mobile clinic teams that come to Leogane and other locations throughout
Haiti provide somewhat of a medical “safety net” so to speak, though admittedly
at times it is irregular and filled with holes. Partners-in-Health is a primary medical provider for Haitians in the
Central Plateau region.
The Kenny article uses a pejorative phrase – the “dumping of used clothing”
– when discussing a few examples of how good intentions can at times lead to
unintended adverse consequences. I have
first-hand experience with such “dumping”.
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| 0103 |
In early May 2011, muddy floods waters invaded Hopital Sainte Croix,
requiring a three day clean-up to get the operating rooms, and the rest of the
hospital, fully back into action. (Photos 0103 and 0107 show some of the muddy
floor conditions. These early May 2011
photos were taken before I properly set my camera’s embedded photo date.)
.JPG) |
| 0107 |
Next to the two operating rooms was “Salon C”, which at that time was being
used for storage. Over the next week, I
was involved in deciding which of eighty or so boxes in this storage area
needed to be disposed of because they were contaminated, and which ones could
be moved to a storage depot on the guesthouse floor. I started this project, with four hospital
workers, thinking that it was too bad we probably would have to dispose of at
least half of the boxes with important medical supplies, because they had
absorbed muddy water that at one time was 2-3 inches deep in Salon C.
My concerns soon vanished, when I discovered that of the eighty or so boxes,
more than fifty contained surgical scrubs – tops and bottoms – that were Size
XXXXL. Over the course of the next two
months while I still was at the hospital, we only used three or four of the
XXXXL boxes, and then only for clean-up rags or to place against a door to hold
back casual water from heavy rainfall.
The Kenny article advocates monetary donations as one of the most effective
ways to support organizations and people
in developing countries. I agree. Jeanne and I are members of St. Anthony on the
Desert Episcopal Church in Scottsdale. Earlier this year, in addition to providing funds to a school in Leogane
and an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, the
Vestry made a four year commitment to provide a full scholarship for a nursing
student at the Episcopal Nursing College in Leogane. It currently is the only four-year nursing
school in Haiti. Individual parishioners
at St. Anthony also are providing scholarship support to other students at the Leogane
nursing school.
Nursing college graduates have positions of respected standing in Haitian
society. They will play
an
important role among those Haitians motivated, in the future, to assume a
greater role in the delivery much need preventative and therapeutic medical
care in their own country.
I hope this note finds you and your loved ones in good health and spirits.
Peace,
David
14 May 2012
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