Submerged

 

I was arranging the pharmacy in our clinic one afternoon when two teenaged Haitian boys ran up to me and started screaming at me in Creole. The year was 1981 and I had no idea what they were saying but they indicated with hand motions to follow them. 

So we ran about a quarter-mile down a dirt road just south of Montrouis, Haiti. Montrouis is a small village about an hour north of Port au Prince and sits on the Caribbean Sea. 

As we approached the beach, I could see a large crowd of people surrounding something. I approached kind of tentatively and could see there was a young boy lying on his back and a couple of young men were performing some sort of CPR. 

All I could think was that he drowned. I took over the CPR, but the boy seemed cold and gone, and after a little while I stopped my efforts to revive him. 

Still kneeling by the boy, I looked up and a little girl said to me in English, "Hees ok?" I told her no, that he was dead. 

The little girl translated to the crowd what I had said and the crowd began to talk loudly and then began to shriek in disbelief that the boy was gone. 

I got up and moved to just outside the periphery of the crowd and watched as crying women put their hands in the air and threw themselves onto the jagged rocky beach in sorrow. 

So this was Haiti. In 1981, I did not know much of anything about the country. But I did know what death looked like and the universal sorrow it causes. And Haiti seemed no different. 

Comments--

• Haiti is a great teacher. But you have to want to learn. 
• About 10 years later, in the early 90s, I started wondering why their roofs leaked.  

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org